This week we are discussing Murder Your Employer: The McMaster's Guide to Homicide by Rupert Homes, Ch. 14-36.
Content Warning!!! This book contains situations and subjects related to: sexual content, murder/violence, death, sexism, suicide, homophobia, transphobia, racism, and pregnancy.
Spoiler Warning!!! This post is full of spoilers for Murder Your Employer: The McMaster's Guide to Homicide by Rupert Homes.
Discussion:
Jac: Hello friends and welcome to our second discussion of McMaster’s Guide to Murder Your Employer by Rupert Holmes. This section had me super tense for most of it. The “Track Meet” was full of surprises and dangers and tricks. I was NOT expecting that MULTIPLE “classmates” to end up being faculty. It makes me want to know if other sponsored students receive the same treatment, or if there’s something special about Cliff and his sponsor.
Michaela: I was wondering if there have been many sponsored students before. Everyone seems quite calm about it but they’re watching Cliff so, so closely even after showing he was interested in staying and being a good student. It feels like either his sponsor is really important to the school or Cliff is one of the few sponsored students to ever come here.
The track meet was so stressful. Then with Cliff almost instantly trusting Audrey, like my man…..are you sure you know what you’re doing right now. Obviously it worked out but he trusted her so fast, then later questioned it! I do love that Cliff was the type of guy to know his neighbor so well that he recognized her “Audrey sigh”, that was quite sweet even though Cliff is a little dummy who had a staff member living next to him the whole time.
Listen, this Helcamp character….my goodness. That man needs so much therapy and also maybe a straight jacket. He’s definitely more of a ‘killing for fun’ type than what this school is meant to teach. Everyone at this school has a specific vendetta for someone in their life or who had affected their life, Helcamp is out here wanting to murder anyone he can get his hands on. Then we see HH in a meeting with the other staff and they talk about lessening the vetting/screening for the students even more to then have them in a 6 week course! Are they actually insane! I don’t know how much the story will follow up on this, but I think there’s going to be a big shake up at the school on the side of how things are run. Either a big fight to keep it how it is now, the safer option, or things changing and they have to fix all the mistakes that come from it.
Jac: Helcamp has no business being there, and it was dangerous of them to allow him to stay as long as they did. I don’t know if we’ll get any resolution to the conflict between HH and the assistant dean, but I hope we do because that’s almost more interesting to me than the story of the three students. If they go the assistant dean’s route, there’s no doubt in my mind that the college will end up crumbling. They can’t keep their anonymity that way.
I don’t know for sure who I expect to fail of the three students, but the story seems to want us to expect it to be Gemma. The faculty at McMasters was correct - the plan was really shaky. But somehow, I doubt it will be the obvious student so perhaps it’s not her.
Speaking of Gemma, I’m not surprised it was her father she killed. It was a mercy killing, though, and the fact that her target is lording that over her is so disgusting. I want her to be taken care of, but I worry about Gemma in the process. I somehow expect Cliff to find her again, but who knows at this point.
Michaela: I was thinking Doria might be the one to fail because she seems like such a random character to follow. I like her story but I’m not sure why we’re reading about it. Gemma makes sense to me since her and Cliff have a little thing going on but Doria is kind of just there for me.
I find the school stuff a lot more interesting than the character’s theses. It felt really odd to leave the school setting halfway through the book. I’m not sure what to expect from the last third of the book, I feel like there must be some twist coming. Otherwise it’ll simply be their theses succeeding or failing, which feels lackluster considering what the concept is.
Well friends, I think that’s going to be it for this discussion. While there’s a lot of intense things happening in this book, it’s so hard to talk about everything because we’re just waiting to see what happens with each character’s thesis. Until next time!