Honey by Imani Thompson (Borough, £16.99)
Thompson’s smart and incisive debut centres on Yrsa, a young Black woman studying for a sociology PhD and teaching undergraduates at Cambridge. Irritated by her solipsistic, over-privileged students and tired of situationships, she’s fed up with life, and men in particular. Her first killing – that of a much older supervisor who reneges on his promise to leave his wife for a colleague, and steals her research in the process – is an accident, but Yrsa, who has catastrophically poor impulse control, enjoys the sensation and, more importantly, gets away with it. “It’s theory in action”: as victims pile up, her academic research provides a spurious rationale for justifiable anger, as with Hugh, who used her for bragging rights (“Black girl magic, 20 points”).…