A colorful and entertaining crime story with a memorable protagonist.
A short-tempered New York adman finds himself in hot water in Gimple’s novel.
New York City, 1988: Stew Gribnitz, a recently divorced copywriter for a middling Madison Avenue ad agency, has a problem with authority. When his new creative director, James G. Persons, trashes some of his work—literally throws it into the garbage bin—Stew reacts by grabbing Persons’ necktie. “I scrunch it up in my hand, blow my nose in it, rub my armpits with it and stick it down the back of my pants,” narrates Stew. “Then I take the tie and throw it in his face.” By some miracle, Stew doesn’t get fired…but in a horrible coincidence, Persons is murdered shortly thereafter, strangled to death with the same necktie. The police suspect Stew, obviously, and even though he has an ironclad alibi, the New York papers label him the “Madison Avenue Murderer,” causing him to lose his job anyway. While the sudden infamy makes his father proud (“You finally made a name for yourself,” swoons Moish Gribnitz, with whom Stew is temporarily staying), it also makes him a persona non grata across his industry. Luckily, a new opportunity soon presents itself: working as a consultant for Edward Rivette, a dilettante billionaire launching a vanity campaign to become governor of Connecticut. It would be a fairly straightforward job if Rivette’s opponent weren’t a mob-connected former FBI agent willing to kill in order to win—and potentially frame the Madison Avenue Murderer with the crime. Gimple’s prose, as narrated by the chatty Stew, is littered with pop-culture references and puns, and the text is often clever and amusing (Stew describes his “pal Levine, who was one of Brooklyn’s bigger quaalude dealers and used his pill-gotten gains to buy himself a deli in Sheepshead Bay”). Some of the jokes feel very 1980s—Stew repeatedly refers to his ex-wife as the “Orthodox Jewish Vampire Bride from Hell”—but the voice and the material combine to form an effective old-school comedic thriller with a heavy dose of Outer Boroughs attitude.
A colorful and entertaining crime story with a memorable protagonist.Pub Date: July 24, 2024
ISBN: 9798990761575
Page Count: 348
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.
Dead bodies turn up in the first sentence of the prologue in McFadden’s latest domestic thriller.
The mystery of who died is at the pulsating heart of this propulsive tale. As Chapter 1 begins, Naomi arrives home to find the locks changed on the front door of the gorgeous home she shares with her husband, Jeremy, and their 5-year-old son, Teddy. Jeremy steps out the front door and convinces Naomi to move out while he has their home renovated, a plan Naomi knows nothing about. It’s all a ruse, though, as the next day Jeremy tells her he wants a divorce. Naomi is shellshocked and soon discovers that Jeremy is having an affair with Veronica, a beautiful younger woman. What seems at first like a stereotypical story about a man who leaves his wife turns into something else when Naomi decides she’ll do anything to get Veronica away from Jeremy and Teddy, and Veronica decides to fight for what she thinks she deserves. Fans of stalker novels will cringe with delight as creepy things start to happen. Teddy’s stuffed elephant, a gift from Veronica, is found impaled on a kitchen knife; Naomi suspects Jeremy is gaslighting her and that Veronica tried to poison her. A weird confrontation among Jeremy, Veronica, and Naomi at Teddy’s birthday party, to which Naomi shows up uninvited, is priceless. There are three main characters, and any or all of them may be unreliable narrators. Packing the plot with dark, gasp-inducing twists, McFadden outdoes herself in a story about how highly emotional people engage in risky behavior to get what they want—but in this novel, for better or worse, not everyone will survive.
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249631
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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