How to bury a husband—and the patriarchy: A review of The Best Way to Bury Your Husband

What do you get when you mix a cast-iron skillet, four fed-up women, and a global pandemic? A page-turner that asks whether murder might sometimes be the most reasonable option.

Alexia Casale’s The Best Way to Bury Your Husband is a dark comedy with claws—and a heart. It opens with Sally, a woman who kills her abusive husband with a skillet and finds herself surprisingly calm about the corpse. Her kids are grown and out of the house, so her main concern isn’t about custody—it’s about what comes next. How do you dispose of a body? And what do you do when you realize you’re not the only woman in town asking that question?

From that single moment of crisis blooms an unlikely sisterhood. Ruth, a former nurse and single mother turned wife, sees her husband’s aggression end in a fatal accident on the stairs. Samira’s line is crossed when her daughter becomes the next target of her husband’s rage. Janey, exhausted and fragile after giving birth at 42, begins to wonder if she’s the one who needs rescuing. Each woman reaches a breaking point. Each makes a choice. And together, they make a plan.

Set against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic world, the novel asks a chilling but all-too-relevant question: how many abusers went missing during lockdown? The isolation of the pandemic didn’t just increase the danger—it erased witnesses, delayed help, and left women like these four to fend for themselves. But what if they didn’t have to do it alone?

What follows is part crime caper, part emotional reckoning. As the women try to cover up their crimes, they also grapple with whether what they did was truly unavoidable. Did every situation demand death? Could there have been another option? What’s fascinating is how different each woman’s situation is—and how their perspectives shift once they start leaning on each other.

Casale digs into the emotional fallout of violence and the aftermath of revenge. These women aren’t hardened killers. They’re survivors. Caregivers. Quietly heroic in a world that mistook their silence for weakness. They’re also deeply self-sacrificing—each one, at some point, offers to take the blame so the others can go free. They see one another as worthy of second chances, even if they struggle to see themselves that way.

And here’s where the novel hits hardest: The Best Way to Bury Your Husband isn’t about how to get away with murder. It’s about what happens to women who are worn down until murder seems like the only way out. It’s about the heavy, complicated grief that comes after reclaiming your life by ending someone else’s. And it’s about how far women might go—not just to protect themselves, but to protect each other.

Casale doesn’t moralize. She lets the mess sit. And in doing so, she invites us to sit with it too. Would you have done the same? Can a good woman kill and still be good? What does it mean to be “good” in the first place?

If you’re looking for a thriller with a sharp sense of humor, a bold heart, and an unflinching look at domestic violence, this is the one. Just be warned: it may make you eye your skillet a little differently.

Have you read The Best Way to Bury Your Husband? Did it make you root for the murderers—or question what justice really looks like? Let’s talk in the comments.

Related Content

• ‘Shadow pandemic’ of domestic violence (The Harvard Gazette)
• The Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Family Violence: A Meta-Analytical Investigation (MDPI)
• I Survived Domestic Violence: My First Year In Review (A Flower With a Voice)
• How to Bury Your Abusive Husband and the Laws That Shielded Him (Yes!)

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Now that Jack has been forced to reflect on everything he has to lose, he resolves to do better. He’s determined to spend more time at home with his family and repair the relationships that have suffered over the years while he’s been so focused on work. But as Callie’s behavior becomes increasingly bizarre, Jack realizes he has a lot more room to improve than he realized – and it might be too late to save his daughter after all.

For fans of We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Push, and Baby Teeth.