My Sister, the Serial Killer

My Sister, the Serial Killer is a novel by the Nigerian writer Oyinkan Braithwaite, published in 2018 and first issued in Nigeria as an e-book under the title Thicker Than Water. It was her first novel.

Korede and Ayoola are close in the way that sisters can be when one of them has no choice, which is how Korede describes it. Ayoola kills each of her partners supposedly in self-defence, and after each death Korede is the one who removes the evidence, manages the story and keeps her sister from posting anything on social media while the man she has killed is supposed to be missing.

Into this comes the one complication that Korede cannot manage: a doctor at the hospital where she works, the pleasant part of an otherwise flat life, who notices her and then notices Ayoola. The novel is short and told with a deadpan tone, and its subject is the loyalty that holds two sisters together when one of them is a danger to everyone around her and the other has spent her life covering for it.