Originally published: 2017

Author: C K Skuse

Genre: Psychological thriller

Page count: 472

Reading dates: 22-27 February 2018

Lent to me by a friend who told me it was great, this pushed its way to the top of my TBR pile and what a fun read it is.
Rhiannon is in her twenties, works for a newspaper and lives with her boyfriend Craig, so far, so normal.  But surprisingly she is a psychopath. Sweetpea is her diary. In it she details how much everyone annoys her. To be fair her friends and boyfriend do seem pretty dreadful. She lists the people she wants to kill including the cashier in Lidl who squeezes her bread to hard, various work colleagues & people who walk too slow. The only thing she seems to love is her dog Tink and her Sylvanian Families doll house! She details pretty quickly that she has an urge to kill and soon dispatches a sex pest in the most gruesome way. We soon find out something terrible happened to her as a child and her upbringing was also pretty unconventional.
This is the first adult novel by C J Skuse (she has previously written a  number of Young Adult books) and is described as Bridget Jones’s Diary meets Dexter!  Sweetpea is a black comedy. There is a lot of swearing (pretty much every swear word in existence) and its quite gruesome, nasty and shocking in places. Only read if you aren’t easily offended! Despite all this, I quite liked Rhiannon and can relate to some of what she says (without the urge to kill obviously!) and I look forward to the sequel.