Body Count

Julie Mae Cohen

SERIAL killer Saffy Huntley-Oliver’s life is going great. She’s got a fabulous new boyfriend, Jonathan, she’s got away with murder (lots of murders, in fact) and now she’s no longer single, she can get back to her favourite hobby… killing bad men.

But when someone discovers Saffy’s secret hobby and starts sending Jonathan coded messages about her crimes, she has to work out if that someone is trying to break them up, or trying to hunt her down.

Yes Saffy is back with a vengeance – literally – and if you’re still giggling, gagging and gasping from the gruesome chills and blood spills dished up by Julie Mae Cohen (pictured below) in her wickedly funny feminist rage thriller Bad Men, then this razor-sharp and equally deadly sequel – easily read as a standalone – is destined to become your new favourite dark comedy of 2025. Wealthy but wise Saffy’s sensational arrival into the murky world of psychotic but irresistibly charismatic serial killers took readers by storm two years ago when Julie Mae Cohen, the darker side of award-winning author Julie Cohen, turned her hand to crime writing and brought us a fast, furious and fiendish tale that became a prestigious BBC Radio 2 Book Club Pick.

And once again Cohen makes us cringe, smile, laugh and cheer as her thoroughly, and unapologetically, ruthless leading lady continues her murderous mission to make the world a better place by killing, one by one, the bad men… violent men, abusers, paedophiles, men who hurt women and girls.

Saffy Huntley-Oliver is a serial killer par excellence… she’s beautiful, wealthy on account of being a treble-heiress, a former model and a fashion muse. She started killing when she was twelve and she’s definitely not one of those ‘inadequate, pathetic, fragile-masculinity murderers’ that you binge-watch on Netflix documentaries.

And she kills people – specifically bad men – for what she regards as a good reason and has discovered that there are so many bad men out there that even when she’s stalking one, it’s difficult not to get distracted by another.

One particularly bad man she has her sights is Sir Thomas West, a children's TV star (and paedophile) who truly deserves to die, but, unfortunately, there are a few little snags, the main one being Sir Thomas’s very large and muscular, six feet five inches bodyguard who accompanies him everywhere.

The other annoyance in Saffy’s life is that her beloved, sweet and innocent sister Susie is still dating the insufferable and utterly boring Finlay. Susie sees the best in everyone and has no idea how many times Saffy has murdered Finlay in her head.

And then there is her own new, perfectly gorgeous boyfriend Jonathan Desrosiers who writes true crime books and podcasts but has recently declared that he is giving up his crime investigating to find ‘something more positive’ despite all the tempting corpses that Saffy keeps putting in his way. All of this would be easy to ignore in the flush of new love except Saffy has never been in love before, and is finding it weird, so much so that she’s having difficulty separating romance from homicide.

With her finely-honed brain, wicked wit and deep well of resourcefulness, cunning and charm, Saffy is a truly memorable femme fatale but Cohen – whose literary brain must hold a conveyor belt of ‘ingenious ways to murder’ – digs further into Saffy’s complex psyche in this new chapter of her serial killer’s flawed, fascinating and multi-faceted life.

And it turns out that star player and bad ass Saffy has a vulnerable side, a veritable store house of hitherto buried emotions that are exposed by memories from her troubled childhood and by falling so madly in love with Jonathan, all adding fuel to her growing inner conflicts.

And if Saffy is a character in continual development, so too are those that surround her… Jonathan, the unsuspecting and self-deprecating boyfriend, fresh from a divorce and suddenly thrust into a new and wildly exciting relationship, Saffy’s innocent, chalk-and-cheese sister Susie, her boring boyfriend Finlay, and Jonathan’s now jailed man-killer ‘acquaintance’ Cyril Walker who makes some cameo appearances.

With the brutal nature of Saffy’s crimes perfectly leavened by a rich vein of devilish humour, twists and turns at every juncture of her killing spree, the guilty delight to be found in seeing some truly ‘bad men’ getting their just deserts, and a nail-biting cliffhanger ending, it’s pleasing to report that  Saffy’s murderous reign is not over yet!
(Zaffre, hardback, £16.99)