One of Us Must Die by Zelly Ruskin
When her daughter’s fiancé says he wants a marriage just like hers, Sterling Richardson can hardly tell him how appalling she finds the prospect. She has spent years making her family look this happy. Apparently, she’s done that a little too well.
In Zelly Ruskin’s domestic suspense novel One of Us Must Die, Sterling has devoted herself to giving her three children the loving home she never had. Her husband Keith certainly looks the part: handsome, successful, affectionate and eager to tell an audience how much his family means to him. Sterling supplies the details that make his performance convincing. She also knows how little it resembles their life together.
A Family Worth Protecting
Leaving would seem the obvious solution. Unfortunately, Sterling’s wealthy parents have made that option a financially devastating proposition. The trust they established required her to marry before 25; divorce means forfeiting the money intended to secure her and her children’s futures. Her once-promising photography career is buried in a closet, and Keith controls their finances. So much for parental protection.
Now their eldest daughter, Ella, is engaged, and Sterling is determined that nothing will spoil her wedding. But evidence of Keith’s infidelity becomes harder to explain away, particularly when it involves their youngest daughter’s boyfriend’s mother. There’s inappropriate, and then there’s making a mess of the family tree.
Sterling reconnects with Whitney, the fiercely loyal friend Keith helped drive out of her life, and begins looking for a way out. Whitney’s investigative skills and a formidable divorce attorney offer hope. Meanwhile, Sterling’s imagination supplies an increasingly inventive assortment of ways Keith might meet his end. The novel opens with her behind the wheel of his Porsche, accelerating toward him. Ruskin takes us back eight months to discover what brought her there.
The Woman Behind the Smile
Much of the novel’s dark humor comes from the distance between Sterling’s polite responses and her uncensored thoughts. Her observations about Keith’s vanity, her mother’s hauteur and Ella’s endlessly photographable life as a social media influencer are sharp and often very funny. Even when Sterling can’t bring herself to challenge them aloud, she has plenty to say.
Ruskin keeps the third-person narration close to Sterling, whose perceptions are often more reliable than her confidence in them. She notices, questions, then supplies an explanation just plausible enough to let everyone get through another day. Memories interrupt wedding preparations and family outings as she reconsiders the courtship she once found so reassuring. Even romantic gestures begin to take on a different meaning. As Keith uses her insecurities to deflect her questions, we see how she learned to doubt herself. The accumulating evidence makes her predicament increasingly frightening: recognizing manipulation and freeing yourself from it are very different things.
Small household details make his manipulation particularly unnerving. Even the direction a toilet-paper roll hangs becomes a means of torment. Elsewhere, a collection of family photographs reveals how thoroughly Sterling, as their photographer, has disappeared from the picture.
What Children Learn
Sterling’s children, meanwhile, have been paying attention, despite all she has done to protect them. Mitchell increasingly resembles the father she distrusts. Ella thrives on admiration and appearances. Harper’s anger becomes more understandable as Sterling acknowledges the hurt Keith’s dismissiveness has caused — and her own attempts to excuse him. Preserving their supposedly happy home hasn’t kept them entirely out of harm’s way; it has also helped normalize the behavior she hoped to shield them from.
Sterling’s belief that she knows what will protect her children has its own family history. Sterling’s parents restrict her choices in the name of protecting her future. She withholds painful truths to protect her children. Their actions differ considerably, but Sterling has reason to be uneasy about that shared justification. She has worked so hard to be unlike her mother.
As she gathers evidence and plans her escape, Sterling’s guiding principle remains protecting her children. By then, her private murder fantasies have become a less comfortable source of amusement. Her decisions become increasingly morally gray. We’ve seen how much she can explain away when she believes her children’s future depends on it.
Readers drawn to domestic suspense’s fraught marriages and dangerous secrets will find plenty to entertain them here. But Sterling’s most compelling struggle is learning to trust her judgment after years of surrendering it to others. A fine line separates protection from control, and Ruskin gives her genuine reasons to fear the consequences of acting — and equally troubling reasons to fear what happens if she doesn’t.
About Zelly Ruskin
Zelly Ruskin is the award-winning author of Not Yours to Keep (2024). She writes domestic suspense that explores the secrets families keep — and the resilience that carries them through. A former social worker and adoption consultant, Zelly is also a (sometimes) artist and a passionate volunteer for brain aneurysm awareness. When she’s not devising twisty plots, she’s likely traveling or hiking — where the next idea often finds her. She lives in New York City with her ridiculous doodle, Strudel.
