Don't Step into My Office: A Novel [Hardcover]

A gripping debut novel of literary suspense and a vivid portrait of wealth's hidden violence.

Aspiring writer and general layabout Jacob Garlicker doesn't expect—walking along the beach on the night of his twenty-sixth birthday—to witness a murder. After a hapless attempt to help the victim, Jacob decides to forget the incident entirely. And for a while, he does, returning to his bohemian life in NYC as if nothing of consequence had occurred.

Seven years later, Jacob is blissfully married. Nowmostlysober, andmostlyat peace with his failed writing career, he's feeling alright as he heads to his father-in-law's birthday celebration in the Hamptons, even as he knows the well-heeled WASPs that populate his in-laws' social circle will spend the weekend treating him with polite disdain. Everything shifts, however, when Jacob arrives on Long Island and begins to realize that those well-heeled WASPs are not as harmless as they seem.

Over the course of this propulsive, at times blackly comic narrative, Jacob wavers between addled narcissism and earnest commitment as he searches for the brutal, booze-soaked truth. Indebted to the suspenseful, page-turning plotwork of Patricia Highsmith and the operatic madness of Dario Argento,Don't Step into My Officeis a mesmerizing literary puzzle.David Fishkind was born in Massachusetts. His writing has appeared inThe Believer,New York Tyrant,Forever Magazine, andThe Paris Review.Don't Step into My Officeis his first novel.“Once this gets its hooks into the reader, it doesn’t let go.”—Publishers Weekly

“This astute debut is a propulsive story about complicity, what we remember, and what we try to forget.”—Playboy Magazine

“A totally strange, surreal, compelling and very weird book that is dense with plot but would be just as good if nothing at all h