Don't Step into My Office
A Novel
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- CHF 15.00
Beschreibung des Verlags
A gripping debut novel of literary suspense and a vivid portrait of wealth's hidden violence.
Aspiring writer and general layabout Jacob Garlicker doesn't expect—walking along the beach on the night of his twenty-sixth birthday—to witness a murder. After a hapless attempt to help the victim, Jacob decides to forget the incident entirely. And for a while, he does, returning to his bohemian life in NYC as if nothing of consequence had occurred.
Seven years later, Jacob is blissfully married. Now mostly sober, and mostly at peace with his failed writing career, he's feeling alright as he heads to his father-in-law's birthday celebration in the Hamptons, even as he knows the well-heeled WASPs that populate his in-laws' social circle will spend the weekend treating him with polite disdain. Everything shifts, however, when Jacob arrives on Long Island and begins to realize that those well-heeled WASPs are not as harmless as they seem.
Over the course of this propulsive, at times blackly comic narrative, Jacob wavers between addled narcissism and earnest commitment as he searches for the brutal, booze-soaked truth. Indebted to the suspenseful, page-turning plotwork of Patricia Highsmith and the operatic madness of Dario Argento, Don't Step into My Office is a mesmerizing literary puzzle.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A struggling writer is linked to a series of mysterious deaths in Fishkind's beguiling debut. While drinking and wandering alone on the night of his 26th birthday, Jacob Garlicker witnesses a brutal stabbing on the beach at Coney Island. After consoling the victim, he panics and flees. Soon after, his downstairs neighbor, Lauren Smith, is murdered. At the crime scene, he tells detectives Powell and Winston that he didn't know Lauren or anything about her demise. Seven years later, Jacob, now married to the wealthy Emma and having failed to publish his novel, has come to accept that his writing about "male ennui" is simply not marketable. That summer, he travels with Emma to the Hamptons for her father's birthday celebration. There, Jacob is routinely belittled, as when Emma's family friend Dr. Masterson makes fun of his surname. Then Jacob finds Masterson dead on the beach, and Powell and Winston show up to question him about Lauren, Masterson, and two other deaths, causing him to claim, "There's been a whole weird conspiracy or something." Though the novel is somewhat baggy, it coheres into a satisfying portrait of a ne'er-do-well coming to terms with his choices. Once this gets its hooks into the reader, it doesn't let go.
