Excerpt from Evil Genius by Claire Oshetsky, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

That's when Randall sees the used condom over there, on the floor, right at Randall's eye level, and he wants to say: "Get the condom, Vivienne!"—but his courage fails him, and then it's too late, and so he swallows his warning and bites one knuckle. If only there had been more time. If only.

As for Vivienne, she, too, is a creature of the phone company, and she has unimaginatively decided to play sick-in-bed, but it's no good, because her hair is messy in an undeniably sexy way, and not in a sickbed sort of way. True, she is looking flushed but it's by no means the flush of a sick woman. It's an unmistakable postcoital flush, because Randall has put the bloom back in Vivienne's cheeks. Oh yes, my dears. That poor woman should have gone straight to the bathroom and locked the door behind her and claimed some kind of bowel complaint had kept her home from work. I was thinking that's what I would have done in those circumstances. All of us were thinking about what we would have done in those circumstances. Where we would have hidden. How we would have explained. How we would have escaped the coming confrontation. Suddenly Randall sees the husband's boots in the doorway. They're heavy boots. The kind that can break ribs, crack skulls. The husband's name is Gene Bianco and he is president of a company that sells tractors and other farm equipment. He is supposed to be at a tractor convention in Des Moines this week but here he is in the flesh. Randall holds his breath. He didn't tell us the part about holding his breath. Those of us listening to his story intuited it. We were holding our own breath in sympathy.

What the hell, Vivienne! the husband yells.

He's enraged even before he sees the incriminating jism-filled evidence on the floor. He isn't buying his wife's sick-day excuse. Then he does see the incriminating evidence. From under the bed, Randall watches a hairy-knuckled hand reaching down for that evidence, and then the husband shouts the same thing all over again, but louder:

What the hell, Vivienne?—

And then? The roar of a gun.

Here in the designated break room for smokers, Randall paused.

"Gawd, Randall," drawled a woman from the second floor.

I knew this woman a little. Her name was Meena, and she had snuck up from the second floor to the third floor and I didn't blame her because on her floor nothing interesting ever happened. A year ago someone on her floor delivered unexpected triplets. That was it for the second floor in the drama department.

Randall coughed and went on with his story.

All is still. All is dreadfully, dreadfully still.

Then the stillness is broken by the sound of the husband's voice, only now the husband's voice sounds like the voice of a child.

Viv? the husband whispers.

He's too stunned by his own crime of passion to wonder where the man who filled the incriminating condom with his anemic spurts might be. The thought of this other man has been wiped from the husband's mind by the sight of his wife, now a corpse.

By this time in the story the smoke in our smokers' break room was thick and our break time had come to an end but we all lit a second one. We were in no hurry to go back. We smoked our second cigarette and went on to our third. We should have been back at our workstations six minutes ago. To be honest discipline had been lax on the entire floor recently. Ever since Vivienne's fate was sealed, the entire building had been infected by a chaotic flouting of the rules. But anyway. Let us return to Randall, under the bed, cheek to cheek with Vivienne's silk rug. The crazed husband's boots are pointed right at him. The husband is so quiet and still that Randall can hear the aftershock of the gunshot ringing in his ears. He's sure the husband is about to look under the bed and see him and he'd shoot Randall straight between the eyes with the bullet in the next chamber.

Excerpted from Evil Genius by Claire Oshetsky. Copyright © 2026 by Claire Oshetsky. Excerpted by permission of Ecco. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.