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A Novel
by David Fishkind
A gripping debut novel of literary suspense and an astute portrait of the hidden violence of wealth.
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. However, everything shifts when Jacob arrives in the Hamptons 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 Emma Cline, Don't Step into My Office is a richly imagined literary puzzle of mesmerizing intrigue.
"[B]eguiling...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." —Publishers Weekly
"Suspenseful, twisty, and laceratingly witty Don't Step into My Office is a revelation. We need more mysteries like this one and more writers like Fishkind." —Junot Díaz, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
"Fishkind has written a delicious paradox: a thriller whose pages you want to flip through in a frenzy with prose so precise you want to savor every sentence." —Zoe Dubno, author of Happiness and Love
This information about Don't Step into My Office was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
David Fishkind was born in Massachusetts. His writing has appeared in The Believer, New York Tyrant, Forever Magazine, and The Paris Review. Don't Step into My Office is his first novel.
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