Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide by Rupert HolmesMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
When I was in high school, one of my favorite books was Evil Genius by Catherine Jinks, the story of a boy destined to be the greatest supervillain on the planet, except for the fact that everyone at the university for evil geniuses is so dysfunctional that they can't help but plot against each other until they're all killed off.
This book tries to take a similar premise and raise it up to a more adult level, with a peculiar 1950s period setting, and jack up the black comedy quirk factor to the point where I could almost see Wes Anderson taking on the task of filming a movie adaptation, with Ralph Fiennes to play the plummy Dean Harbinger Harrow, of course.
It's a very promising start to a new series (allegedly a second book, Murder Your Mate, is expected later this year), following several new students at a murder college called McMasters, each one having to murder their employer for different reasons. So, naturally, they have to first devise a thesis, then actually carry it out, and it has to be a most elegant and complicated deletion so no one can trace it back to them, let alone the highly secretive school (whose location is an extremely closely guarded secret.)
Author Rupert Holmes has well proven his bona fides for twisty storytelling before. I'm no fan of that "Piña Colada Song," but it's a pretty good example of an ending you can't see coming, and Cliff's story has a few such twists as well. I only wish Holmes had stuck to Cliff as the sole focus character - he was ambitious with his efforts to make this story focus on three different protagonists as deletionist candidates, but unfortunately, he only made Cliff compelling in any way. The fact that his erstwhile boss is a massively corner-cutting, lecherous, drunken asshat with no business in the transportation business makes his storyline really relevant in this time of Elon Musk being the least intelligent alleged genius on the planet today, not to mention the mysterious deaths of so many Boeing whistleblowers.
As for Gemma, she could've been a contender, but she ultimately came off woefully underdeveloped to the point where I found myself skimming her pages. As for Dulcie, she with so many layers of false identities...well, she would've fit far better in a Taylor Jenkins Reid novel, maybe a spinoff to The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, but here, her story and Cliff's just don't work together well in the same book.
But you know what? I'm still hoping to read the second book whenever it comes out, because I'm sure it'll also have some pretty packaging, and perhaps some even more personal stakes if Murder Your Mate truly is the second volume in Holmes's pipeline...
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