Murder Your Employer is easily the best book I've read in six months or more, and even before I had finished the first half, I had decided it was one Murder Your Employer is easily the best book I've read in six months or more, and even before I had finished the first half, I had decided it was one of my all-time favorite novels. For so many reasons.
In short, every element of this novel is precisely fine-tuned. The author's prose is both beautifully descriptive and often hilarious. Truly clever puns abound, and I laughed out loud dozens and dozens of times throughout. Yet the humor didn't lessen the idyllic beauty of the campus setting and descriptions, including the poetic (but never overwrought) descriptions of more gritty places and scenes.
The expert plotting of the novel is both detailed and twisty. There are three main plotlines in the novel, following three McMasters students who are aspiring murderers (or "deletists," in McMasters parlance). And each one twists and turns, leaving the reader in suspense at several different points in their narrative. So reading this book is a bit like reading an Agatha Christie novel on a rollercoaster. Or perhaps even more accurately, reading this book is a bit like reading three different Agatha Christie novels, all woven together, while on a rollercoaster.
Humanizing the tightly crafted plot mechanics, the characters are well-drawn, sympathetic, and strangely heartwarming in a novel filled with deletists (confirmed murderers) and aspiring deletists. Literally 90% of the characters in this novel have already killed at least one person or want to kill someone, but for a wide range of mostly forgiveable reasons. McMasters is full of pragmatists who want to make the world a better place by "deleting" some despicable person, often someone who consistently victimizes others. By the end of the novel, the reader is cheering on the aspiring deletists, hoping they are all able to successfully commit their planned murders. As I was reading, I realized that it takes a very skilled author to revise the standard reader's morality like Holmes has done in Murder Your Employer. His heartwarming characters are a big part of that magic.
While I was making my way through the novel, I also did a little googling and discovered that the Edgar Award-winning author of this novel is the same Rupert Holmes who wrote The Piña Colada song. This fact really delighted me, as did the fact that Holmes has multiple Tony Awards as well. But by the time I finished the book, I no longer found any of this to be the least bit surprising. The novel was so skillfully written that to imagine Holmes as a multi-talented artist was no leap whatsoever.
I cannot stress enough how much I loved this novel. Sign me up to read Volume 2 as soon as it hits the shelves!
Additional note: I highly recommend the audiobook version of Murder Your Employer, which is read by Simon Vance (a favorite audiobook narrator of mine) and Neil Patrick Harris. Who doesn't love Neil Patrick Harris???...more
I'm just going to ignore the very last conversation in this book, which is utterly deplorable, and give the rest of the novel 5 stars.I'm just going to ignore the very last conversation in this book, which is utterly deplorable, and give the rest of the novel 5 stars....more
I'm gratified to realize that I correctly interpreted two of the clues that I recognized while reading the narrative, So my current project of readingI'm gratified to realize that I correctly interpreted two of the clues that I recognized while reading the narrative, So my current project of reading Agatha Christie's Poirot novels back to back must be training my mind. I am also gratified to realize that I still didn't put the whole thing together, which I prefer because I enjoy coming across the final twists and turns at the ending of a Christie novel. All of that to say, without going into too much detail, that I thoroughly enjoyed Five Little Pigs and I agree that this is one of the Agatha Christie's most finely crafted novels....more
I remember loving the Kenneth Branagh movie version of this novel when it came out several years ago, but I didn't think I remembered the plot. Then fI remember loving the Kenneth Branagh movie version of this novel when it came out several years ago, but I didn't think I remembered the plot. Then fairly quickly as I made my way through the novel, the general solution of the crime came back to me. But knowing the culprit of the murder didn't lessen my enjoyment (is that the right word?) of observing how Poirot unraveled this particularly emotional case. The whole scheme is so fantastic, yet makes the reader seriously interrogate the means of justice in society overall. Is there more than one good method of trial by jury?...more
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