Bathory, or Bath, the narrator of Stephanie LaCava’s Nymph, is a Latin scholar and assassin who likes to play with words, especially when describing her own complex situations. ‘So, I’m in the back of a front,’ she says when she’s taken to the storage room of a grubby Manhattan stationers’, the cover operation for an intergenerational band of contract killers. She gets this knack, among other things, from her mother. 

Bath, whom we meet as a child, gradually realises that both her parents are assassins. While making her way through prescribed stages of maturity – a tormenting affair with a family friend’s son, a university degree which bores her – she develops an interest in the family trade and is grudgingly welcomed into New York’s criminal underworld. The story unfolds as a series of short episodes. As in LaCava’s previous novel, I Fear My Pain Interests You (2022), a great deal of action takes place off the page in the gaps between sections. In one section Bath is driving a car for the first time; in the next, she’s eating diner burgers with her longtime crush, Iggy, talking about how she’s been able to drive for a year. We also learn that, during the intervening period, her father has disappeared. 

The characters themselves are often confused. Bath tells us she likes to mess with her analyst and her long-term casual lover James protests that he does not really understand her. For the first section of the book, Bath is in the dark about her parents’ profession. There are crashing hints