Author MK Oliver [Zoe Norfolk]

SHE’S set her sights on acquiring an £8million Victorian villa, moments from Hampstead Heath, and getting her daughter into a top prep school.

Hampstead “beckons like a siren” for aspiring upper-middle-class mother Lalla Rook, who is also determined to ensure that her banker husband is made a partner at his firm, boosting the family income.

But former head teacher MK Oliver’s comic thriller A Sociopath’s Guide to a Successful Marriage has barely begun when it becomes apparent that there’s something very dodgy at the root of vigorous social climber Lalla, the novel’s prime character.

Giving an estate agent-like description of her current home in Muswell Hill (familiar territory for author Oliver), Lalla matter of factly mentions that one of its two light-filled reception rooms contains a dead body. It’s the corpse of a male intruder she has stabbed seven times with a vegetable knife.

She’d been preparing carrot sticks for her son Nathan’s fourth birthday party.

Closing the door on the body and several pints of blood over her Persian rug and parquet floor, she goes ahead with the party. After all, the cake alone cost nearly £400.

Juxtaposition of the macabre with the ordinary and domestic fuels the dark humour in the novel, a debut from Oliver.

A keen to-do list writer, Lalla notes “Relocate corpse” below “Morning swim at Heath Pond” and Foxtons house viewing, Hampstead.”

The carefully plastic-wrapped dead body – ruthlessly competent Lalla learnt gift-wrapping techniques from a Liberty tutorial – finally ends up, thanks to help from a friend and a wheelbarrow, in the concrete footings of another friend’s pool house in Hampstead. Where else?
“Isn’t Hampstead beautifully quiet?” Lalla remarks at the burial scene.

The dead intruder turns out to have been investigating Lalla, whose past is intriguingly unravelled, though all memories sit “emotionless” in her mind.

Only the future interests her – what she wants and what she needs to do to get it. She hones in relentlessly on her vision of success.

Blackmail, intimidation, deception, attempted bribery… all par for the course as she pushes to get her daughter Nelly into the exclusive prep school.

Social pretensions are wittily satirised, polite masks slip. In a parking scrum at the prep school’s activity day, posh cars jostle for spaces “like cornered beasts”.

After a red Jaguar SUV nicks the place Lalla has her eye on, she scrapes her nail scissors along the paintwork, pushes the blade into a tyre for good measure, then mounts a kerb to nab herself a parking space, driving over a sapling.

The author, who worked for many years as a teacher and head teacher, has said his school experience has given him a very rich background to draw on, and he “enjoyed hugely exaggerating the panic and fear which comes from people keen to get their children into the best schools”.

Told in Lalla’s voice, the story zips along, with plenty of plot twists.

She leaves more than one corpse in her wake. And she ensures a man suffers a nasty shock involving live wires and a urinal.

But the story’s abusive men evoke no sympathy, and you feel a certain gleeful admiration for Lalla.

She’s devoid of empathy but is indomitable, audacious, refuses to be cowed, is unhampered by guilt. Her actions may be appalling, but she says “I never delighted in other people’s destruction. It was always just a practical necessity for me.”

No cosy family feeling for her. If she had to save anyone she’d first ensure Purdy her cat was safe.

But we glimpse another side to her. She has to turn away to hide her distress after spiteful remarks are made about her children, Nathan and Nelly, by her wealthy, manipulative, downright horrible mother-in-law.

Lalla will go the extra mile to ensure things work out well for the children – clearly regardless of whether that involves dastardly deeds hidden behind the mask of yummy-mummy-hood.

Little Nelly is one of the joys of the book, a chip off the old block. Lalla likes her daughter’s rebelliousness, though she’s miffed that Nelly is “stubbornly committed to being less bright than she needs to be”.

Nelly’s “little accident” involving the class hamster prompts a teacher to express concern about the child’s lack of basic empathy. Nelly staples another girl to her seat and disrupts the school nativity play. But she’s disarming, non-conformist, happiest dressing up as “something she’s not”.

Lalla finds Nelly’s prep school entrance exam practice papers clogging up the toilet.

This funny, clever, highly entertaining tale is now being adapted for TV. But Lalla is already a star.

From a story glossed with wealth, privilege, fancy clothes and luxurious surroundings, she emerges priceless, leaving us wanting to know what she’ll do next, and whether Hampstead holds her future.

• A Sociopath’s Guide to a Successful Marriage. By MK Oliver, Hemlock Press, £16.99