It took me a bit longer to read Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide than I’d figured initially. This is actually a pretty interesting and entertaining murder mystery where the mystery is not who dies or who dunnit; it’s how the would be ‘deletist’ (we don’t say ‘killer’ here) will achieve their goal while not getting caught and still observing the 4 main principles of ‘deletion’ (we don’t’ say ‘murder’): Is this murder necessary? Have you given your target every last chance to redeem themselves? What innocent person might suffer by your actions? Will this deletion improve the life of others?
This is in some ways a really twisted Harry Potter/ Sherlock Holmes remix. The story starts with poor Cliff Iverson who tries to kill his admittedly terrible corporately evil boss, not quite succeeding, and getting drafted into the McMasters Conservatory (scholarship sponsored by an unknown benefactor) to make sure that he does not fail the second time. Cliff’s journey is not the only one either; we also follow Dulcie Mown who’s really Doria Maye (famous actress who wants to delete the director who has started to destroy her career) and Gemma Lindley (she’s being blackmailed by her terrible boss who takes credit for all Gemma’s work). This is specialty school and world unknown to us mundanes (you have to know someone who knows someone to get in), and it’s also kind of an homage to the highly detailed nature of an attempted crime in a Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie murder scenario. The schemes all three would-be employer deletists come up with are that level of complicated, and of course a good chunk of it is not explained until later (in some cases with more detail than others, but you can probably fill in most missing blanks if you’ve been paying attention). The characters really are kind of relatable in that their employers are practically cartoon villains, and the students need lessons in everything from Erotic Arts to Alibis to ‘Wump’ (Wardrobe, Makeup, and prosthetics).
By the end of the story, you see whether or not the three students ‘graduate’ but completing their ‘thesis’, and what might be next for those who do finish successfully (those who fail are typically “taken care of” by the school). The end of the book adds another minor twist that at the same time nearly re-frames the whole thing. It’d be spoilers to say much about this but it’s both “{person}! Noo!” and ‘I don’t’ see how you did not see that one coming’. It’s both open-ended and closure.