Honey

Yrsa is a twenty-five-year-old Black British PhD student in Sociology at the University of Cambridge, writing a thesis on Afropessimism, a theoretical framework arguing that anti-Black racism is so foundational to society that liberation can only come through total collapse. When her colleague Nina, a Polish student who studies genocides, arrives at the department visibly upset, Yrsa already knows the cause: Nina's supervisor, Erick Richardson, had an affair with her, promised to leave his wife, then abandoned her and began using Nina's research uncredited in his forthcoming book.

At Corpus Christi College, Yrsa encounters Richardson. A bee lands on the rim of his Sanpellegrino lemonade. Knowing he has a severe bee allergy and never carries his EpiPen, Yrsa knocks the bee into the drink. Richardson swallows it, goes into anaphylaxis, and collapses. Yrsa watches him die without calling for help, then rolls him over, places her hands on his chest, and cries out, performing the role of a distraught bystander. The police accept her account. Walking home, she eats a strawberry ice cream and replays his death with elation.

This is not Yrsa's first killing. When she was thirteen, her grandmother, who had Alzheimer's disease, begged Yrsa over eight months to help her die. On the eighth month, Yrsa held her underwater in the bath while a honey cake baked in the oven, then told police her grandmother had slipped while Yrsa was retrieving the cake. It was the first time she experienced what she later describes as "the sweetest sense of anything" (235).

Weeks later, at a college formal dinner, Yrsa reconnects with Hugh White, a fellow PhD student. After the meal, Hugh uses a stolen key to take her onto the roof of the Wren Library at Trinity College. Sitting on the parapet, he confesses he has fancied her since their first year. Then he reveals that his rugby drinking society ran a point-scoring system for sleeping with women: Sleeping with a Black woman was worth twenty points, labeled "black-girl magic." Yrsa pushes Hugh off the roof and deletes their texts from his phone. She suggests to the college Dean that the death was a drunken accident, and the investigation goes quiet.

These killings awaken something in Yrsa. She folds violence into her academic framework, writing: "If violence turns subject into object, then is it only through violence that one can return to a subject position?" (92). She reads Saidiya Hartman's Scenes of Subjection, focusing on the case of Celia, an enslaved woman who killed her owner after years of rape, and begins to see her killings as methodology. Wherever she goes, she plays a mental game: See a man, imagine how to kill him, identify the problems with the plan.

Her attention turns to Sam Mack, an internet misogynist with millions of followers and charges of pimping and pandering underage girls. Tracking his movements through social media, Yrsa follows him to a boat party in London and slips crushed pills into a drink she gets him to take. Paramedics arrive too quickly, and Mack survives.

She next identifies Henry Davidson through an online forum where sex workers warn each other about dangerous clients. Henry, a Goldman Sachs analyst, has a documented history of racial degradation and assault. Posing as an escort, Yrsa lures him to an Airbnb, endures his violent and racist demands, then drugs him with ketamine and injects him with heroin. She watches him die, cleans the scene, and whispers "For Venus," Hartman's name for all enslaved women. Shortly after, she receives an anonymous email: "i know what you've done" (165). The messages continue, and she cannot identify the sender.

Amid these killings, Yrsa meets Isiah, the grandson of her elderly neighbor Blake. Isiah runs a garden school in Peckham and is warm and earnest. They fall into an intense romance: He cooks for her, takes her to Athens, and tells her he loves her. For the first time, Yrsa experiences something close to genuine connection.

Running parallel is the return of Felix Smith, Yrsa's first boyfriend from school. During their relationship, a sex video of the two of them was distributed among their classmates and briefly uploaded to YouTube. Yrsa has always believed Felix sent it, and the incident destroyed her friendships and social standing. Her mother, Candice, invites Felix to dinner without Yrsa's permission, and Yrsa begins seeing him again, intending to kill him.

She visits his flat, drugs his beer with ketamine, and when he lunges at her in a struggle, grabs a baseball bat and beats him to death. She stages the scene to look like a gang attack by writing a postcode on the wall and builds an elaborate alibi. At Felix's funeral, where she delivers a eulogy at the family's request, her old school friend Kitty Denver drunkenly confesses that she, not Felix, distributed the video. Kitty found it on his phone at a party and sent it out of jealousy. Felix had been telling the truth all along, and the justification for his murder collapses.

This revelation does not stop Yrsa. She recalibrates, deciding the true replication of the grammar of violence lies not in the act itself but in getting away with it. Her mother visits Cambridge and reveals, with chilling composure, that she has spoken to the detective investigating Felix's death and provided Yrsa with an alibi. Candice also reveals that a photograph Yrsa once found of a naked man hidden under the bedside table was "the last" of Candice's own similar compulsions. She places Yrsa's copy of Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, inside which Yrsa keeps her list of future targets, on the bed and says: "You need to start being sensible about things now, Yrsa. I already told you, enough" (303).

Yrsa tries to stop. She tells Isiah she loves him, destroys the book containing her list, and revises her thesis to focus on structures rather than violence. But at her surprise birthday party, her father innocently reveals to Isiah that Felix was Yrsa's ex-boyfriend, not the family friend she claimed. Isiah, who had seen messages from Felix on Yrsa's phone during their trip to Athens, confronts her and leaves.

In the weeks that follow, Yrsa reverts. Using a fake dating profile, she matches with Stephen, a lonely, fifty-two-year-old logistics worker who adores his adult daughter. They spend an evening dancing and laughing, but Yrsa discovers a political flyer for Sam Mack's new party in Stephen's house. Despite her resolve to stop, she drives Stephen to a remote car park and kills him with an injection of epinephrine.

Returning to dispose of the body, she is confronted by Mary, the girlfriend of Kyle, a man Yrsa has been sleeping with casually. Mary is the sender of the anonymous emails, which were about Kyle's infidelity, not about the murders. Yrsa laughs with relief. But Mary gets into the car and discovers Stephen's body. Yrsa locks the doors and drives north toward the Fens, the flat marshlands of eastern England. Mary begs and promises silence. Yrsa says she does not want to kill her but acknowledges Mary has seen too much.

The novel ends in the dark marshland. Yrsa touches the needle in her pocket and reaches for Mary's shoulder. The final image is of Yrsa's grandmother on her last day alive, turning to look at her granddaughter: "past liberation, past forgiveness. Palms open to the sky" (363). The novel ends here, leaving what Yrsa does next—and whether Mary survives—deliberately unresolved.