Well it's quite a ride this one.

Perdita is the star of the show (novel) a friend had been killed Nando who was roofer and she'd saved his life only a few years earlier when he fell whilst doing a neighbours roof. He's younger and gets on well with everyone it seems well almost. Prerdita has a good group of friends may be a little crazy at times but isn't everyone at times, think that's what they say about me so hopefully I'm not alone in that. Anyhow back to the review.

The story skips between the time of the fall and just after then the days after the murder which was set in early 2020 before "the plague" hit. You may guess ahead some of the plot there's a lot of will they won't they type situations but really well done. Prerdita has a brother whose an addict in and out of recovery which adds an extra twist to the tale but certainly makes it more colourful. She married with 2 kids and runs a counseling service well sets it up during the novel.

This is a well written story and well worth reading j enjoyed it I hope you do as well.

Cassandra Neyenesch’s A Little Bit Bad is one of those novels that slips a hand around your wrist and pulls you into a life already in motion—messy, magnetic, and impossible to look away from. At its centre is Perdita Jungfrau, a woman who has spent years trying to be good, sensible, and predictable… until she isn’t anymore. What begins as a reckless, intoxicating affair with Nando—her neighbour’s anarcho‑Marxist roofer, fifteen years her junior—spirals into a tangle of desire, guilt, and self‑reckoning that feels startlingly human.

The book moves between the heat of their affair and the cold aftermath: Nando has been murdered, Perdita’s husband is bewildered by the stranger his wife has become, and Perdita herself is juggling motherhood, grief, and the slow‑motion collapse of her younger brother to addiction. Neyenesch writes these tensions with a confiding, conspiratorial tone—almost as if Perdita is whispering her worst impulses to you over a glass of wine.

What makes the novel so compelling is its emotional duality: it’s sharp and funny in places, then suddenly tender, then quietly devastating. Perdita’s voice is charismatic, flawed, and painfully self‑aware. She’s not always likeable, but she’s always alive on the page. And the mystery—who’s watching her from the parked car outside, what really happened to Nando—threads through the narrative with a slow, simmering unease.

This is a story about desire and consequence, about the versions of ourselves we try to bury, and the ones that claw their way to the surface anyway. It’s messy, bold, and surprisingly moving—a novel that lingers like the echo of a confession.

My thanks to Cassandra Neyenesch, the publisher and netgalley for the ARC