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Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide by Rupert Holmes | 399 pages This book started out a lot like "The Witchstone"  , where I was super jazzed about the concept from just the first few chapters and then the execution didn't quite live up to the expectations that were promised early on. The premise of this book is that the protagonist (Cliff Iverson) was wronged by an employer, and after a pretty ham-fisted attempt at murdering him, is faced with either facing the consequences of that... or being enrolled at McMasters, a professional educational institution dedicating to helping people carry out "perfect murders" of their targets and then getting away with it.At first Cliff is understandably skeptical, then determined to escape from the surreal surroundings in which he finds himself, before eventually seeing the benefits of being supported in his desires to end the life of his former boss. And the book does a great job of establishing his former boss as the kind of person where the world really would be better off without him (which adds a bit of nobility to Cliff's character; he's not just some disgruntled employee). The early chapters are great, especially when Cliff first arrives at McMasters. There's so much murder innuendo going around campus, and some truly delightful exchanges with other students and faculty that make the whole book teeter on the edge of believability, without ever really going too far. Where the book started to fall off a little, for me, is that the experiences on the McMasters campus start to get a little tiring and redundant. It's a bit of a "too much of a good thing" situation where there are only so many murder puns and "Haha, if this were a real murder attempt you'd be dead!" surprise from another student you can do before it starts to feel like you're just retelling the same joke over and over again. Eventually, the story does leave McMasters so Cliff can work on his "thesis project" (i.e., killing his quarry), and that's where things go off the rails a bit more, for two reasons. First, Cliff has been the protagonist of the book through and through up to this point. Nearly every chapter is either what's happening to Cliff, or Cliff relaying what is happening in the form of a journal he's writing to the sponsor who put him up for a scholarship at McMasters. But all of a sudden, when he's out in the real world, the book starts hopping around between Cliff's "thesis," plus the "theses" of two other students he met at McMasters, and the narrative from that point kind of follows three point-of-view characters; one we've been with the whole time, and two others who we don't have the same investment in. So I found myself kind of skimming the complicated murder preparations from characters I don't know, about intended victims that I'd never met until that point in the book. Second, Cliff's new murder plot is waaayyy too complicated. While there's partially a narrative reason for that (the idea Cliff came up with includes corporate espionage, gambling, and other unsavory things), it just plain went on for too long. Chapter after chapter of Cliff going here to do this, then going there to do that. It all comes together at the end, but the end is probably about 100 pages further out than it needs to be. It was a satisfying conclusion to the story, but one that came after I was starting to get really bored with the story between pages 200 and 350. And I suppose that was my biggest complaint about the book. It was a fantastic idea for a novella or a short novel. If this were cut down and streamlined into a snappy 250-300 pages, this would be an incredible book. But the author instead chose to drag it out a bit with unnecessary subplots and an overly complicated main plot that just didn't need to be that way. Still, if you like murder mysteries, it's a fun read because it's not often you get to read about the planning of the murder rather than the solving of one.  I picked this book for the "books about new beginnings" theme this month because if an engineering professional getting fired and going back to school at the world's premier murder-plotting school isn't a new beginning for your life, I don't know what is!  |
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