Murder Your Employer: Book 1 MacMasters Guide to Homicide
By Rupert Holmes
Avid Readers Press, 2023, 388 pages.
★★★★
Who hasn’t thought, “I could just murder my boss?” Most people really mean they just want that boss to go away–preferably to a different solar system. But what if you actually meant it?
Murder Your Employer is a wickedly funny book filled with puns, ironic names, and ways to dispatch human targets. Some methods would make Rube Goldberg proud. The MacMasters Conservatory for the Applied Art is a Hogwarts for homicide. None of the students know where it’s located. If they are accepted, handlers meet them, blindfold them inside a windowless van, and drive, fly, and sail for several days in circuitous ways. Is the campus in North America, England, Eastern Europe, China, or just around the block? They will never know as they cannot leave the cloistered, sprawling campus and will exit the same way they entered. MacMasters has it all: a professional staff, a science center, laboratories, a market, a lake, athletic fields, a bamboo forest, hinged and unhinged fellow students, a castle, and gardens. Exercise care when visiting the gardens. Some plants are designed to “delete” (i.e. murder) an employer.
It's very expensive, but one of the four main characters, Cliff Iverson, has been sponsored by an unknown benefactor. Think Great Expectations with a nasty twist. He was rescued by watchful MacMasters staff after bungling an attempt to push his boss, into the path of a subway train. Cliff worked as an aeronautics engineer for Woltan Industries, but was fired by Merrill Fielder for pointing out a flaw in the design of a new aircraft that could kill hundreds. Fielder only cares about how profits would sink if the plane was taken off the market. He was also responsible for the suicide of one of Cliff’s close friends, hence Iverson believes Fielder worthy of deletion.
MacMasters holds sanguinary values, but it is not amoral, which is why some students are uniquely dismissed. Four “Enquiries” must be answered satisfactorily before a plan to delete an employer is approved: “Is the murder necessary? Have you given your target every last chance to redeem themselves? What innocent person might suffer from your actions? Will this deletion improve the life of others?” The narrative is told via Iverson’s journal and from the voices of two other students and that of Dean Harbinger Harrow. The time period is not specified, but internal clues suggest the early 1950s.
The other two students are Gemma Lindley, who works in the health care industry. Her boss at St. Ann’s Hospital, Adele Underton, is a gorgon and blackmailer. Adele steals all of Gemma’s ideas and passes them off as her own, uses Gemma as her personal lackey, and does virtually no work of her own. About the only people who tolerate her are men she attempts to snare, though most don’t last long.
We also meet “Dulcie Mown,” who strikes everyone as familiar. She’s actually Doria Maye, a fading but attractive actress who dearly wishes to delete Leon Kosta, a movie producer who sleeps with every aspiring actress and makes Harvey Weinstein seem a candidate for the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. He has it out for Maye because she rebuffs his continuing carnal advances, refuses an order to have sex with an executive to seal a business deal, won’t give her a role from a script she discovered, tells her she’s a has-been, and wants to demean her by making her do cartoon voices. Kosta also employs a spy to watch Doria and tries to ban her from the studio lot.
Could the world do without such creatures? MacMasters enrollees had better hope so. It has the ultimate pass/fail system. Students undergo a rigorous curricula in everything from weapons training, handling reptiles, and deadly uses of erotica to concocting untraceable poisons, devising disguises, and feigned incompetence–the latter a useful skill if, for example, you wish to dispatch someone with a bow and arrow. They must produce a “thesis,” individual plans for executing their bosses. That thesis is only complete when they do so; if they are unsuccessful, a MacMasters staff member will delete the student with a painless injection!
Author Rupert Holmes has also worked in films and penned “The Piña Colada Song.” This novel is a bit like that novelty tune: clever, goofy, and sometimes cheap. I loved it!
Rob Weir
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