In Kill Dick we have a morally superficial young woman, Susie Vogelman. Aspiring artist, junkie, and Brentwood parvenue whose father is a lawyer for opioid manufacturer Dick Sickler.
Additionally, we have Susie’s former NYU professor who has reinvented himself in LA as Peter Holiday. He’s set up a scam drug rehab, trying to find his twin brother, all while becoming indoctrinated into a cult of money and power.
And Royal-Lee, sexually ambiguous teenager, who is Susie’s dealer and live-in help for Peter. Chased by memories of Jehovah’s Witness indoctrination and a hateful mother.
That’s bare bones information on the three. There is more but suffice to say the are drug fueled, self-absorbed, piteous creatures of little renown – who have the murder of Sickler as their credo.
The city of Los Angeles appears as a sunlit nightmare where brands, money, drugs and violence all blur together in a homogeny of excess. Intrigued?
What seems most compelling about Kill Dick is its refusal to be only one thing. It’s not a conventional crime novel built around suspense or clear revelation. Instead, it appears part noir, part addiction narrative, part critique of privilege.
Goebel leans into deliberate excess rather than restraint, using damaged characters to expose the grotesque performance of modern seriousness, especially where wealth and suffering intersect. That instability seems to be a feature rather than a flaw.
Goebel is doing something vivid, risky and at times, metafictional exploration. A murder plot threaded through questions of class, stupefied artifice, and principled collapse. It’s filled with characters whose gaze feels impossible to meet, for you’d be drawn into a vortex of intense, unsettling darkness. For me, this was less satire and more feverish exposition, but you may read things differently. Regardless, Kill Dick is a very interesting book.
~ June Lorraine Roberts
Murder in Common is in the Top 20 of the Feedspot Top 80 Crime Novel Websites
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