Korede is a nurse at a Lagos hospital. She is responsible, organized, meticulous, and deeply ordinary. Her younger sister Ayoola is beautiful, charming, careless, and has now killed three of her boyfriends. Each time, Korede gets the call. Each time, she shows up with bleach, rubber gloves, and a plan. Each time, she cleans up the mess, disposes of the evidence, and tells herself that this time was justified, that Ayoola acted in self-defense, that the men deserved it. By the third killing, even Korede can’t quite believe her own rationalizations. Then Ayoola starts dating the doctor Korede has been quietly in love with for months, and the question shifts from whether Korede will continue protecting her sister to whether she can protect someone she loves from the person she loves most.
Oyinkan Braithwaite published My Sister, the Serial Killer in 2018, and it landed with the precision of its own title. Short, sharp, and darkly funny, the novel carved out a space between crime fiction, dark comedy, and family drama that felt entirely new. The response was enthusiastic and remarkably consistent: readers praised its wit, its pace, and Braithwaite’s refusal to explain more than absolutely necessary. The criticism, when it appeared, focused almost exclusively on wanting more of everything the book offered.
Braithwaite’s Razor-Sharp Voice and the Comedy of Complicity
The voice is the first thing that hits. Korede narrates with a dry, clinical precision that makes the horrific events she describes somehow both funny and chilling. She approaches murder cleanup the same way she approaches hospital sanitation: as a problem with specific steps and a correct solution. This deadpan quality gives the novel its distinctive tone, a tone that stays consistent even as the emotional stakes escalate. Braithwaite never breaks character to signal that something is supposed to be shocking or funny. She trusts the reader to recognize both on their own.
The dynamic between the sisters is brilliantly drawn. Ayoola is beautiful in the way that disrupts rooms. People stare, men pursue, women resent. Korede is plain, reliable, and invisible in exactly the way that responsible older siblings often are. Braithwaite captures the particular resentment of being the competent sibling, the one who manages everything and receives nothing, with an accuracy that readers with siblings recognize instantly. The fact that this dynamic plays out against a backdrop of serial murder doesn’t make it less relatable. If anything, it sharpens the familiarity into something uncomfortable.
The Lagos setting gives the novel a texture and specificity that distinguishes it from Western thrillers. Braithwaite doesn’t explain Lagos to the reader. She writes from inside it, and the city’s rhythms, its social hierarchies, its specific blend of modernity and tradition, are woven into the narrative without ever becoming exposition. The hospital, Korede’s apartment, the family home, the restaurants and traffic jams: all of it feels lived-in, and the novel’s Nigerian identity is integral to its story rather than decorative.
The pacing is relentless. At 240 pages with short chapters, the novel moves with an urgency that makes it nearly impossible to put down. Braithwaite cuts scenes the moment they’ve delivered their payload and moves immediately to the next. There’s no padding, no scenic detours, no passages that exist for atmosphere alone. Every chapter advances either the plot or the reader’s understanding of the sisters’ relationship, and most chapters do both.
The Cost of Moving So Fast
The brevity that makes the novel so propulsive also prevents it from achieving the emotional depth that its premise promises. Korede’s inner life is rendered primarily through her actions and observations rather than through sustained reflection, and there are moments where the reader wants to go deeper into her psychology than Braithwaite allows. The question of why Korede keeps helping, what mixture of love, habit, fear, and obligation drives her complicity, is present throughout but never fully explored.
Ayoola remains somewhat opaque, and whether this is a strength or a weakness depends on the reader’s tolerance for ambiguity. Braithwaite deliberately keeps the reader at a distance from Ayoola’s inner world, letting Korede’s perceptions of her sister do the characterization. The result is a figure who is compelling as a force in the narrative but frustrating as a character. Some readers find her mystery essential to the novel’s tension. Others find her underwritten.
The romantic subplot involving Dr. Tade Otumu is the novel’s thinnest strand. Tade functions primarily as a device to raise the stakes of Korede’s loyalty, and he doesn’t receive enough development to feel like a real person caught between two dangerous women. He’s an idea of a love interest more than he is a love interest, and the tension around whether Ayoola will harm him doesn’t land as hard as it should because the reader hasn’t been given reason to care about him independently.
The ending, while thematically consistent, may leave some readers wanting more resolution. Braithwaite concludes the story in a way that feels true to the dynamics she has established but that doesn’t provide the dramatic payoff that the escalating tension seemed to promise. The novel ends where it needs to end, but the reader has to do some work to feel satisfied by the choice.
Blood Ties That Can’t Be Cleaned Away
My Sister, the Serial Killer is about the contracts we sign without reading. Korede didn’t choose to be Ayoola’s protector. The role was assigned by birth order, by family dynamics, by a society that placed all value on Ayoola’s beauty and none on Korede’s competence. Braithwaite suggests that family loyalty, the kind that operates below conscious choice, can become its own form of captivity. Korede knows what Ayoola is. She has always known. But knowing doesn’t free her, because the bond between them was formed before either of them had a say in it. The bleach and rubber gloves aren’t just tools for cleaning crime scenes. They’re the instruments of a devotion that was never requested and can’t be refused.
Should You Read My Sister, the Serial Killer?
Readers who enjoy dark comedy that doesn’t soften its edges will find Braithwaite’s voice irresistible. Anyone who wants a thriller that can be finished in an afternoon without feeling disposable will appreciate the density of the writing. It’s also a strong choice for readers interested in contemporary Nigerian fiction, because Braithwaite writes Lagos with the confidence of someone who knows it rather than explains it.
Skip it if you need your characters fully excavated. Braithwaite sketches where other writers paint, and some readers will find the brevity frustrating rather than elegant. Also skip it if dark humor about violence doesn’t appeal, because the novel’s tonal control depends on finding murder darkly funny, and readers who can’t make that leap will find the whole enterprise uncomfortable.
The Verdict on My Sister, the Serial Killer
Oyinkan Braithwaite’s debut packs more insight about family, beauty, and complicity into 240 pages than most novels manage in twice the length. The voice is distinctive, the pacing is merciless, and the central relationship between the sisters is drawn with a specificity that makes it feel universal. The novel sacrifices depth for velocity, and some characters function more as mechanisms than as people. But as a piece of controlled, darkly comic storytelling about the terrible things we do for the people we can’t stop loving, My Sister, the Serial Killer is as sharp and clean as the title suggests.