Don't Step into My Office

A gripping debut novel of literary suspense and an astute portrait of the hidden violence of wealth.  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. However, everything shifts when Jacob arrives in the Hamptons 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 Emma Cline,  Don't Step into My Office is a richly imagined literary puzzle of mesmerizing intrigue. A gripping debut novel of literary suspense and an astute portrait of the hidden violence of wealth.  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. However, everything shifts when Jacob arrives in the Hamptons 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 Emma Cline,  Don't Step into My Office is a richly imagined literary puzzle of mesmerizing intrigue.