The two books under discussion here have one specific element in common. Revenge. And how! John Lanchester’s offering, Look What You Made Me Do, takes its title (and inspiration?) from one of Taylor Swift’s most famous ‘diss’ songs: it’s a track from the Reputation album. In the case of both books here, Better Than Revenge off Speak Now might be the more apposite Taylor-themed analogy. We are talking pretty extreme. Both authors are male; the three chief protagonists are all female.

Lanchester’s book first. Jack is a successful architect. At a dinner party, he makes the mind-bendingly preposterous remark that the chef Yotam Ottolenghi “has done more damage to this country than the Luftwaffe”. But don’t worry: by page 24 Jack’s dead after a heart attack. His now widow, Kate, regarded herself as “the controlling one” of the couple, and over the course of the remainder of the story that doesn’t seem hard to believe. First we go through her long period of mourning, and how she copes before that process is brought to a juddering halt while she is visiting friends. She learns that the new hit TV series is called Cheating. An oft-repeated line of the male adulterer is “Want your body, disco doll” – a phrase Jack used to say to Kate when she was late getting ready to go out. Kate thinks the seemingly obvious: Jack must have been having an affair with the writer of the show, Phoebe Mull. Or is there another explanation?

Eventually there is. The genesis of the whole plot is that long ago, when they were all undergraduates at Oxford, Kate had poached Jack from his then girlfriend, who (one can see this coming from quite far away) is now Phoebe’s mother. Phoebe’s script has been an act of attempted revenge, and she has indeed caused a huge amount of torment to Kate’s life. So what’s Kate to do? Double-down, of course, which she does with pleasure and a huge quantity of vindictiveness as she seeks her vindication. It probably goes without saying that neither main character has much by the way of redeeming features.

The same goes for the vast majority of the cast in A Sociopath’s Guide to a Successful Marriage by M.K. Oliver. The star of the show, the sociopath in question, is Lalla Rook, who lives with her husband in Muswell Hill in North London. The book opens with a tricky problem for her – how to dispose of the body of a man she has just killed in her home before the guests arrive for her young son’s birthday party? As she puts it: “I’ve been slightly overwrought recently: Nelly’s [her daughter’s school] admissions tests for one thing, my mother-in-law’s interference in our lives, for another.” And now this!

In due course there are more problems than bodies but this is not her only involvement in the death of a man. There’s also the attempted murder of her first husband, who she in fact thought she had killed and whose resurfacing causes potential bigamy problems which need to be resolved. Amid dealing with that, she also dabbles in extortion, distortion, blackmail, bribery and theft, endeavours which frequently involve unloading on her ‘friends’, although since they are for the most part as ghastly as Lalla, albeit without her zest for adventure and and relentless grasping for a better life on behalf of herself and her kids, one cannot feel to sorry for them. The book is in part a thriller, in part a mordant take on middle-class issues like house-moving and better schooling.

One might consider Lalla to be a Becky Sharp for the internet age. Oliver tells her story with relish and humour. Despite the efforts of everyone at some point, no one can end up getting the better of her. You cross her at your peril.