Don’t Step into My Office

A struggling writer is linked to a series of mysterious deaths in Fishkind’s beguiling debut. While drinking and wandering alone on the night of his 26th birthday, Jacob Garlicker witnesses a brutal stabbing on the beach at Coney Island. After consoling the victim, he panics and flees. Soon after, his downstairs neighbor, Lauren Smith, is murdered. At the crime scene, he tells detectives Powell and Winston that he didn’t know Lauren or anything about her demise. Seven years later, Jacob, now married to the wealthy Emma and having failed to publish his novel, has come to accept that his writing about “male ennui” is simply not marketable. That summer, he travels with Emma to the Hamptons for her father’s birthday celebration. There, Jacob is routinely belittled, as when Emma’s family friend Dr. Masterson makes fun of his surname. Then Jacob finds Masterson dead on the beach, and Powell and Winston show up to question him about Lauren, Masterson, and two other deaths, causing him to claim, “There’s been a whole weird conspiracy or something.” 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. (Jan.)