Neurosis and Necessity

DAVID FISHKIND’S DEBUT novel Don’t Step into My Office (2026) is a suspenseful, enigmatic murder mystery that winds across two decades of life in New York and several inexplicable deaths. The narrator, Jacob Garlicker, is a failed writer and liberal arts layabout whose aimlessness inadvertently causes him to witness a murder at Coney Island. He dismisses the encounter after dutifully reporting it to the police, but a series of incidents in his later life as a married man causes him to see things—including his in-laws—in a new light.