Title: Etiquette for Lovers and Killers

Author: Anna Fitzgerald Healey

Publisher: Fleet/Hachette; RRP: $34.99

Review by: Marian Chivers, July, 2025

This is Anna Fitzgerald Healy’s debut novel. Her writing has been featured in several literary magazines and short story anthologies. She grew up on the Maine coast (where this story is set). She now works in Los Angeles, living in a (possibly haunted) miniature castle in the Hollywood Hills.

The author writes in a letter to the reader at the beginning: “Set in my grandparents’ dilapidated Cape Cod-style house in the 60s, this story follows Billie through the woods and windswept islands of my childhood. Etiquette for Lovers and Killers is a novel like a tall, dark, nerdy stranger. A partner in crime for all the girls who couldn’t decide between the pulpy thriller or the rom-com in the bookstore. Because honestly, why can’t we have both?”

I wonder whether Anna has read much romantic suspense with period settings, Gothic thrillers like Victoria Holt’s immediately spring to mind and the like of Mary Stewart for later 20th century tales. This novel has strong elements of these with some nerdy 21st century ethos channelled into the 1960s setting. Each chapter starts with a piece of etiquette and Anna’s and Billie’s love of language is shown in the use of footnotes defining certain words and their histories. At first the footnotes annoyed (uncomfortable reminders of academic research and writing) but they started to grow on me as they showed aspects of Billie’s character and also hinted at happenings within the mystery.

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Bille (Wilhelmena McCadie) is a 26-year-old virgin, qualified as an archival linguist trying to find a job but working as a seamstress in the small Maine town of Eastport in the early 1960s. She lives with her grandparents as her parents were killed in a car crash two years earlier. In the summer the tourists and the rich come to spend time in their “cottages”. Billie is bored – she’s surrounded by dull people – until an engagement ring and a cryptic love letter appear in her post box, addressed to “Gertrude”. She then meets rich, handsome Avery Webster, who owns a boat, as many of the rich characters do. Then the unsettling phone calls and visits from a man in a fedora begin. Events really start to heat up when she’s one of the last people to see Gertrude alive… and the first to see her dead.

There follows an intriguing mix of stalking, blackmail, champagne secrets and M&Ms (did you know they were first manufactured in the 1940s?). Everyone has a secret and as the body count rises and danger looms, Billie begins to suspect that she is more than a side character. Who killed Gertrude and the others? One killer or many? Just how innocent is the handsome, squeaky-clean Avery? The plot draws you in as the bodies and the suspects mount. It is written in a witty, erudite way and conveys the era well. The reader is left wondering just what Billie will accept in behaviour from this collection of characters, especially her love interest.

Marian Chivers has a lifelong interest in reading and writing with her work and study involving books from children’s literature to post graduate studies.

Review copy supplied by the publisher