Book Synopsis

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. Now mostly sober, and mostly at 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 Office is a mesmerizing literary puzzle.

Review Quotes

"Suspenseful, twisty, and laceratingly witty Don't Step into My Office is a revelation. We need more mysteries like this one and more writers like Fishkind."--Junot Díaz, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

"Fishkind has written a delicious paradox: a thriller whose pages you want to flip through in a frenzy with prose so precise you want to savor every sentence."--Zoe Dubno, author of Happiness and Love

"A wicked literary opera, complete with blood and guts, that plays out like a shredded film and stitches itself back together, blissfully, only when the curtain falls. Don't Step into My Office is a striking, dangerous debut."--Frederick Barthelme

"Apparently, in French, they have a phrase that's like 'this has a certain Je m'en foutisme, ' to mean where an artist has no prospects or responsibilities and their work attains the transcendental I-don't-give-a-fuck quality that everyone else strives for. Don't Step into My Office just has that magic thing. It's really funny. I love this book."--Gabriel Smith, author of BRAT

"This noirishly divine 'office' is meticulously crafted, luminously droll, hyper-lucid, and volcanically comic. Security and HR have been told to stand down as readers breathlessly rush in."--Bruce Wagner

About the Author