Angry Pigs, Fishing Mishaps

This first novel, written by a veteran New York journalist, begins at The Barbara Bush Home for the Criminally Insane, a Federal institution plunked down “like a lump of bacon fat on the great sizzling griddle that is west Texas, north of Abilene.” There we meet Paul Bittner, a magazine writer turned murderer who is serving a life sentence. In the pages that follow, our narrator relates how he came to be a killer and find himself behind bars. It’s a tale set in Manhattan, in the bars and restaurants and private clubs—as well as in the offices and cubicles and conference rooms of major national magazines. It’s a story of backstabbing and betrayal, of revenge and retribution, of dysfunctional bosses and disillusioned workers, of mind-numbing bureaucracy and the quiet savagery of the workplace—all of it fueled by drugs and alcohol and random sexual encounters. In the end, it’s a story of how one man is consumed by fate and his own weakness--and how he then finds a strange brand of redemption.