Murder Bimbo

Novack debuts with a sly and incendiary novel centered on a sharp-witted and supremely unreliable heroine who commits a shocking act of political violence. After assassinating a boorish third-party presidential candidate on what she mistakenly believed were orders from the government, the unnamed narrator—a sex worker in her early 30s—flees to a safe house in Vermont. With little time before the authorities track her down, she decides that her one chance at survival rests with telling her story on the feminist podcast Justice for Bimbos. Adopting the moniker “Murder Bimbo,” she composes a series of emails to the host laying out her career in sex work, a traumatic previous run-in with the man she killed, and her recruitment by a group of men passing themselves off as government agents. So goes the novel’s first act. In acts two and three, the narrator retells her story to other people, shuffling the characters’ motivations and leaving readers to parse the real from the fake. “This is a story about strange coalitions,” writes Murder Bimbo—a conflicted Marxist who fantasizes about doing a “Scrooge McDuck into a pool of gold”—and Novack’s novel forges fascinating connections between its colorful, if sometimes thinly drawn, cast. Readers will be seduced. Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME. (Feb.)