Murder Bimbo
A Novel
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“Murder Bimbo is Gone Girl for the Luigi Mangione era, and Rebecca Novack is one of our funniest and most acerbic new writers.” —Catherine Lacey, author of Biography of X
The exhilaratingly twisty story of a sex worker turned political assassin on the run, Murder Bimbo is an unputdownable and wholly fresh take on truth, murder, and optics in our national moment.
A thirty-two-year-old sex worker is shocked when she’s approached by undercover government agents to aid them in a top-secret plot to assassinate a politician known as Meat Neck. But once the deed is done, she realizes what made her the perfect recruit: She’s 100% disposable.
Holed up in an off-the-grid cabin in the woods, she now has only two days, her wits, and a laptop to save her own life.
Her best bet is to reach out to the wildly popular feminist investigative podcast Justice for Bimbos. In a hastily typed series of emails, the newly minted “Murder Bimbo” explains how she was recruited and then trained by a cabal of code-named US agents to take out Meat Neck.
Then she opens a new email. This time, it’s addressed to her ex, and the facts line up a little differently…
Constructed in three increasingly unhinged acts, each a more subversive version of the story than the last, Murder Bimbo can be read as a gloriously bold literary thriller, a satirical vigilante's manifesto, or a raucous send-up of the political insanity we all live inside every day. Either way, it’s a dead-serious announcement of an electric new voice in American literature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novack debuts with a sly and incendiary novel centered on a sharp-witted and supremely unreliable heroine who commits a shocking act of political violence. After assassinating a boorish third-party presidential candidate on what she mistakenly believed were orders from the government, the unnamed narrator—a sex worker in her early 30s—flees to a safe house in Vermont. With little time before the authorities track her down, she decides that her one chance at survival rests with telling her story on the feminist podcast Justice for Bimbos. Adopting the moniker "Murder Bimbo," she composes a series of emails to the host laying out her career in sex work, a traumatic previous run-in with the man she killed, and her recruitment by a group of men passing themselves off as government agents. So goes the novel's first act. In acts two and three, the narrator retells her story to other people, shuffling the characters' motivations and leaving readers to parse the real from the fake. "This is a story about strange coalitions," writes Murder Bimbo—a conflicted Marxist who fantasizes about doing a "Scrooge McDuck into a pool of gold"—and Novack's novel forges fascinating connections between its colorful, if sometimes thinly drawn, cast. Readers will be seduced.
