Evil Genius

Finalist for the CALIBA Golden Poppy Award in Fiction

"[A] noir delight of a novel … . Evil Genius is deceptively light on its feet, skittering across the page to deliver its scorpion sting.”
— New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)

A Recommended Read from: Alta * Bustle * Electric Literature * Forbes * LitHub * Los Angeles Times * Kirkus * New York Times * People * Vulture

It’s 1974 and San Francisco is full of mystery and menace. Nineteen-year-old Celia Dent keeps telling herself how lucky she is to be working at the phone company and to be married to her Drew, a man who says he loves her. Celia’s contentment with her little life is shattered, though, when a woman she knows from work is murdered in a love tryst gone awry. What would that be like, Celia wonders, to die for love—or to kill for love? What would it be like to live each moment passionately and with full awareness that each breath is bringing her closer to her last?

Before Celia knows it, her musings about love-and-death happenings are bleeding into daily life. Suddenly she’s playing hooky from work and searching for a love tryst of her very own. She’s practicing her marksmanship at a local gun range and thinking about how good it would feel to bury something sharp inside her domineering husband’s ear. It’s all pretend, though, until the night comes when Celia finally goes too far, and she and Drew are set on a deadly collision course.

Exhilarating, surreal, and bitingly clever, Evil Genius is a comic noir exploring obsession and desire—and what happens when a sweetly seditious young woman dares to imagine a better life.