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.
My Boss Is A Dead Man: A Tale of Passion, Greed, and Job Interviews
Carol Frank has enough on her plate, working as the office manager at a new law firm while trying to rekindle a romance. Being suspected of murder certainly throws a monkey wrench in the works. But a bad boss from Carol's past - one her friends will know as the Psychotic Sadist - has disappeared under very mysterious circumstances, and Carol is at the top of the Kansas City Police Department's suspect list. The fact that, years ago, she might have hatched the murder plot herself does not make things any easier for her, nor does the fact that her fingerprints are on the murder weapon.
Finding the solution isn't in her job description, but Carol was never one who could leave a mystery alone. The course of her investigation reveals much more than she expected. How does one conduct a successful job interview with a kleptomaniac? Is the most prestigious law firm in town cloning its secretaries? Is it possible to fit both herself and Gus Haglund into her tiny shower stall? How does one talk to a ten-year-old boy? And just exactly how many uses are there for a collection of glass paperweights? Once again, Carol pours all her secretarial skills into solving the puzzles of passion, greed and job interviews that emerge when she realizes My Boss is a Dead Man.
Notes from the Legal Secretary
My Boss is a Serial Killer and its sequels had a number of inspirations (I love detective stories as much as Carol Frank does!), 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: