Add to box!

Rupert’s 30th birthday party is a black-tie dinner at the Kentish Town McDonald’s—catered with cocaine and expensive champagne. The morning after, his girlfriend Clemmie is found murdered on Hampstead Heath, a single stiletto heel jutting from under a bush.

Who killed Clemmie? Was it the blithe, sociopathic boyfriend? His impossibly wealthy godmother? The gallery owner with whom Clemmie was having an affair? Or was it the result of something else entirely?

All the party-goers have alibis. Naturally. This investigation is going to be about aristocrats and Classics degrees, Instagram influencers and whose father knows who.

Or is it ‘whom’? Detective Caius Beauchamp isn’t sure. He’s sharply dressed, smart, and thoroughly modern—he discovers Clemmie’s body on his early morning jog. As he searches for the dark truth beneath the luxurious life of these London socialites, a wall of staggering wealth and privilege threatens to shut down his investigation before it’s even begun. Can Caius peer through the tangled mess of connections in which the other half live—and die—before the case is wrenched from his hands? Bitingly funny, full of shocking twists, and all too familiar, The Other Half is a truly stunning debut.

Don't just take our word for it...

“The Other Half is a perfectly modern whodunnit. The plot is as entertaining as its skewering of aristocracy is astute, and the characters feel real enough to walk off the page. I can’t wait to read Charlotte Vassell’s next book!”
– Harlan Coben, #1 New York Times bestselling author of I Will Find You

“Imagine A Handful of Dust meets The Great Gatsby on a Northern Line tube to Kentish Town. That’s The Other Half by Charlotte Vassell, a crime thriller as sharp, witty and energetic as it is bitingly satirical. Vassell’s lively prose is utterly compelling and so stylish she can meld ancient Greece and 21stCentury London without batting a Euclid. Reminded me of Waugh with every turn of the page. In The Other Half she might just have created a Vile Bodies for the Millennial generation.”
– Janice Hallett, internationally bestselling author of The Appeal and The Twyford Code

“A scintillating debut which shifts effortlessly from the sacred to the profane by combining a cast of compulsively ghastly characters, a truly engaging cop, Ancient Greek, Instagram, a corpse on the Heath and a butler in McDonald’s. Much of what I loved about The Secret History is to be found here, but with a thoroughly modern sensibility all of its own.”
– Harriet Tyce, author of Blood Orange

Taste the very first page

A girl is dying. A girl who wears bespoke perfume. She wants you to inhale her deliciousness; to know that she is untouched by the dirt, the smog, the filth of your London. Pathetic men rub their underdeveloped legs against her arse as they commute to their piteous ‘careers’ on the hamster-cage tube. She wants other women to covet her manicure as she types an ‘empower- ing’ Instagram post about her ‘inner glow’. People follow her. A be-legginged messiah to the inflexible, undesirable, slovenly masses. She drinks spirulina, kombucha and matcha, but she doesn’t eat wheat or dairy. She’s faking an allergy to mask her disordered eating, which she won’t seek help for because it feels so very normal nowadays. It’s a shame, she used to like eating bread. She waxes everything. Everything. She is filthy. Filthy. Used to do anything, absolutely anything, if it meant he’d stay with her.

A girl is dying. She is savvy. Astute. Commercially minded. Clever. She’s clever. She knows that all she really has to sell is the idea of her beauty, her youth, her long rolling vowels, and she does. In the old stories Pygmalion made Galatea, but this new Galatea made herself and streamed it live. She put it on a T-shirt, on a tote bag. Got paid for sharing a link to organic date and cashew nut energy balls (£6.50 for four, not including postage). She believes in self-improvement. She practises her poses and reads her prose. She believes in love and practises that too. She has put so many hours into practising, hours and hours, tears and tears, and yet . . . She can be droll. She’d buy you a…

December 2023