Legal secretary Carol Frank is great at her job, even if she must cope daily with the extreme quirks of her obsessive-compulsive boss, Bill Nestor.  Attorney Bill produces wills and other estate documents for his clients, many of whom are elderly widows who, for some mysterious reason, later commit suicide.  Or do they?  Carol takes notice of the high mortality rate of Bill's clients when a criminally attractive detective comes to the office asking questions.  Though at first her interest in the case is purely an interest in the detective, she begins to suspect that there is something more going on with Bill's client list than customer service. 

    Revealing a conspiracy while navigating the waters of office politics isn't covered in the company policy handbook, and Carol must find answers to some hard questions.  Is it acceptable to work for a killer, as long as he's polite? Do kinky sex games with a detective signify underlying psychoses, or just that she's easy?  Does a secretary have to get pre-approved paid-time-off in order to run for her life?  When one is attacked at the office, does destruction of clothing count as a tax write-off? These and many other murder, romance and filing dilemmas will be tackled in My Boss is a Serial Killer (Sourcebooks, September 2008).

Notes from the Legal Secretary

   My Boss is a Serial Killer had a number of inspirations, but I must admit that the most influential of these was boredom.  After so many years of endless afternoons at the office, I couldn't help thinking things like, "Wouldn't it be cool I stumbled across a real mystery hidden in all these old files?"  This was a fun idea, except I then realized that any truly intriguing puzzle uncovered in an office would have the intrigue crushed right out of it, under the weight of red tape, gossip and the pecking order.

    Offices are strange places, due to the dynamics of putting a number of diverse people together in close quarters for about a third of their waking life under a fairly strict but often arbitrary set of rules.  Everyone is really there to earn a paycheck, yet human nature doesn't tend to remain detached, particularly when the human whose nature is in question is bored because she just transcribed her five hundredth tape of the year.  Thus my fun idea of an office mystery could not help but become an office parody as well.  To an office staff, anything unusual, no matter how morbid, can become the subject of adventure

    Here is an example.  A few years ago, one of my co-workers fainted at her desk and an ambulance was summoned.  This event caused such a stir that people talked about it for weeks.  I heard so many renditions of the story of Jane's complete collapse and the heroic deeds that followed (i.e., "It was I who first noticed Jane's lack of responsive noises!"  "It was I who suggested an ambulance be called!"  "It was I who hurried to the window to watch for the ambulance!") that the entire, relatively innocuous incident became far more like live entertainment than a minor office crisis.  Thank you, boredom.  Jane is fine, by the way.  Seems it was a problem with low blood sugar.  Anyway, this event has always lingered in my thoughts as a great example of how far an office staff will go to entertain itself, particularly since these enthralling tales of saving Jane went on long after the episode ended.  ("It was I who transposed the thrilling events of that fateful day into a teleplay to be performed on the Oxygen Network!")

    One of the perks of enjoying writing is that the writer is free to explore a scenario in any direction, as far he or she wishes to go.  I thought of the many ways that an office, bogged down with employees desperate to be entertained, might respond to the scenario of a serial murderer.  And what would a secretary do, if she had a really good boss who just might be doing something really bad?

Christina Harlin

Links:

Order My Boss is a Serial Killer
Email Christina Harlin
Sourcebooks, Inc.
Barbara Braun Agency