Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide is a 2023 novel by Rupert Holmes. It follows three aspiring murderers as they attend the McMasters Conservatory for the Applied Arts, a school that instructs its students how to "delete" their intended targets without getting caught.
Tropes:
- Affably Evil: Many of the faculty at McMasters come across as friendly and dedicated to their craft so it is debatable as to whether they qualify as "evil".
- All for Nothing: By the end of the novel, Dulcie comes to feel that her murder of Leonid Kosta was pointless since he was about to be replaced by a new studio head and her career is in even worse shape than it was before.
- Asshole Victim: McMasters emphasizes that only people who are irredeemable deserve to be "deleted", which is certainly the case with at least two of the targets. Merrill Fiedler is a corrupt business executive who makes poor aircraft design decisions that put innocent lives at risk. Leonid Kosta is a sleazy Hollywood studio head who expects sexual favors from actresses in exchange for advancing their careers. Subverted with Adele Underton who is a generally unpleasant person and a blackmailer but does not go out of her way to make others miserable. She is the only one of the three who lives.
- Even Evil Has Standards: McMasters has several qualifications that a target must meet before they are deemed suitable for a "deletion", such as the fact that no innocent people will suffer as a result of their death.
- Here We Go Again!: Dulcie thinks that Kosta's replacement, Claude Revenson, is not much better than his predecessor and tells Dean Harrow, "I could just kill him."
- Insistent Terminology: McMasters does not like using the word "murder" and insists that all students and faculty use the word "deletion" instead.
- Karma Houdini: The purpose of McMasters is to help people commit the perfect murder so that they will never be suspected, let alone caught. Cliff and Dulcie succeed in evading suspicion, although Dulcie's career is still going nowhere. Gemma fails in her attempt and is nearly killed herself, but Dean Harrow offers her a position on the McMasters faculty and she accepts.
- Mercy Kill: Gemma did this to her father to spare him from more pain. Adele is aware of this and uses it as leverage.
- Posthumous Character: Guy McMaster, the school's founder.
- Public Exposure: Dulcie takes nude photos of herself as part of her alibi.note
- Uncertain Doom: The ending implies that other faculty members did away with Dean Harrow because he wrote the book and risked revealing McMasters to the rest of the world.
- Villain Protagonist: Played with. Cliff Iverson and Gemma Lindley are likable characters who convince themselves that murder is their only option, whereas Dulcie Mown is a self-centered Hollywood actress who wants to use murder as a way of furthering her acting career.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: The three protagonists, their fellow students and the faculty at McMasters see what they do as a way of ridding the world of people who make others' lives worse.
- Where the Hell Is Springfield?: McMasters' location is top secret and Cliff's attempts to figure it out are fruitless.
