Murder Bimbo

The novel opens with an unnamed narrator, a 32-year-old sex worker, fleeing New York City by car in the middle of the night. She fights exhaustion for hours, arrives at her destination at 5 a.m., and declares herself a genius before sitting down to write. The novel is structured in three acts, each revealing a different version of the same events as the narrator tailors her story for different audiences, progressively exposing her as an unreliable narrator whose true motivations are far more complex than she initially lets on.

Act I consists of emails from the narrator, who signs herself "Murder Bimbo," to a podcast host she calls "Justice Bimbo." Justice Bimbo hosts Justice for Bimbos, a show that rehabilitates the reputations of maligned women such as Monica Lewinsky and Aileen Wuornos. Writing from a shabby cabin at a former children's camp, the narrator reveals she has killed Meat Neck, a rising far-right political figure, and asks Justice Bimbo to tell her story before she becomes a scapegoat. She notes that Justice Bimbo's wife wrote a viral takedown of Meat Neck for which he sued her, making Justice Bimbo the ideal audience. The narrator presents herself as a naive but resourceful sex worker recruited into what she believed was a government assassination operation.

She describes how, the previous spring, a canceled client left her free to attend an academic lecture on women in the clandestine services. Afterward, two men she nicknames Onions and Eyebrows approached her, claimed they had been observing her, and invited her to an interview. She provides background on her life: raised in the Midwest by liberal parents, her mother turned cold when she got her first girlfriend at 16 and eventually changed the locks. She entered sex work at 22 after a scam landlord left her needing money.

At an interview in a downtown high-rise, she takes personality and intelligence tests alongside three other women. Another interviewer she nicknames Walnuts tells her she scored high in resourcefulness, personability, and narcissism. Eyebrows offers her the job: a dangerous assignment involving casualties and requiring a new identity afterward. She negotiates the salary from $55,000 to $65,000.

At a satellite office in Somerville, the team, consisting of Walnuts, Onions, DC (nicknamed for his national monument T-shirt), and Eyebrows, reveals their target is Meat Neck. The narrator's role is "front of house": She will lure him away from a public event so the team can kill him. She and DC develop a disappearance plan involving a staged move to Canada. Meanwhile, a separate assassination attempt on Meat Neck by unknown gunmen fails and boosts his popularity, but the team views his refusal of additional security as an opportunity.

The full plan emerges: at a crypto gala in New York, the narrator will lure Meat Neck to his hotel suite and poison his martini with Metildigoxin, a cardiac drug lethal in high doses. After hearing the plan, she walks through Somerville and encounters women distraught over Meat Neck's public defense of raping an ex-girlfriend as "soft rape." The encounter reignites her resolve, though she privately decides to escape on her own rather than wait with the body as planned.

On October 17, the narrator arrives at the gala and enters the control room to find over 20 strange men packed inside. She notices tattoos and a neo-Nazi symbol and realizes her team members are not government agents but white supremacists. DC confirms the truth in the hallway, explaining they lied because no sex worker would knowingly work for them. Panicked, she agrees to continue primarily to buy time. In this version, the poison vial breaks when she trips entering Meat Neck's suite, and he rapes her. In an act of survival, she grabs a steak knife from room service trays and stabs him to death.

Act II shifts to present-tense narration as the narrator finishes the Justice Bimbo emails and begins writing to X, her ex-girlfriend. She addresses X with romantic intensity, framing the assassination as a gift meant to rekindle their relationship. In these emails, the recruitment becomes a bar meeting with Onions and Walnuts, whom she now describes as young, bumbling white supremacists she recognized from the start. The original plan was to make a sex tape with Meat Neck to discredit him; only after the failed assassination attempt boosts his popularity does the team pivot to murder. She negotiates $1 million.

She reveals a darker family history than the one she gave Justice Bimbo: her parents had alcohol addictions and were abusive, and they disowned her for being gay. She discloses that she and X broke up because X pressured her to testify about Meat Neck's assault and she refused. X arranged a rooftop meeting with a federal agent who turns out to be DC, an experience the narrator felt as a betrayal. She also reveals that DC is an undercover agent whose superiors want Meat Neck dead but need others to do the killing. In this version, the narrator finds a switchblade in Meat Neck's bathroom, hides it in her boot, and stabs him when he sits down to order room service.

Interludes between the emails reveal the narrator's activities at a Vermont compound: she scouts the property, locates shovels, and digs a grave in the woods. DC arrives despite her warning not to follow, confirming her belief that he will never stop pursuing her.

Act III provides the narrator's unmediated internal monologue, exposing both prior narratives as strategic fabrications. She crafted the Justice Bimbo emails to create a sympathetic persona and the X emails to rekindle romantic longing. Her actual origin story is ordinary: she was a sex-curious kid from a stable family who drifted into sex work after paid encounters in college.

She reveals she initiated the assassination plot herself. The neo-Nazi young men were friends she already knew through 17, a regular client and young tech millionaire. When they discussed abducting a minor politician to impress an online white supremacist network called the Service, she told them to think bigger and suggested Meat Neck. She also reveals that after her breakup with X, DC became her stalker, booking her as a client, following her, and threatening to have her arrested. She describes sleeping with DC to keep him compliant and planning his murder once she realized he would never leave her alone.

The true assassination proves far less dramatic than either prior telling. Meat Neck is polite, even tired, and confides doubts about his political career. They have sex. Afterward, she stabs him. There is no rape, no broken poison vial, no self-defense.

Back in the present, the narrator poisons DC with strychnine hidden in a cocktail, lures him into the woods, and waits beside his body as he dies. She prepares to bury him, reflecting that killing is easier than she expected.

In the epilogue, the narrator has settled in a non-extradition country near the coast. Justice Bimbo releases a four-part podcast about the assassination. Six months later, X arrives. They have sex, but the narrator's feelings have changed. Over breakfast, X's controlling habits resurface, and the narrator realizes the obsessive longing that drove the entire plot has dissolved. Her love becomes a radiant, nonspecific force directed at everyone and no one. She contemplates leaving the house, and X, with nothing but a small blue bag, feeling alive, curious, and free.