In February 2025, when Rebecca Novack’s Murder Bimbo (Avid Reader, Feb.) went on submission, “some editors were like, Nope, we’re not going anywhere near this,” Novack recalls. Others (nine bidders, to be exact) embraced the novel’s bold subject matter and slippery style. The polarizing premise: the title character, an anarchist Marxist sex worker, assassinates a third-party right-wing presidential candidate named Meat Neck. “I like insane pitches that excite or shock people,” says Avid Reader VP, executive editor Margo Shickmanter, who also edited Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch. “And then the book had the voice to back it up, which they don’t always,” Shickmanter adds.

Novack wrote the first draft in 2022, before the high-profile shootings of Donald Trump in 2024 and right-wing activist Charlie Kirk
in 2025. “None of it took a lot of inventing,” she says, describing political violence as part of our “ambient world.”

The novel consists of Murder Bimbo’s long emails to the host of feminist podcast Justice Bimbo, which she composes while holed up in a remote cabin, explaining how she came to kill Meat Neck in a Manhattan hotel. Over the course of her emails, Murder Bimbo spins multiple versions of events and throws in a lesbian love story. Novack says she wanted to play with readers’ preconceived notions of sex workers. “When you mention sex work in public, you get 20 stories that autofill in someone’s brain,” she says. Her self-possessed protagonist scrambles assumptions about the background, lifestyle, and motivations of someone who enters such a profession.

Novack is a protean figure herself. Born in Colorado and currently living in New York’s Hudson Valley, Novack has a master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School. After considering a career as an Episcopalian priest, she pivoted to academic publishing and now works in educational technology. All the while, she was writing novels, only to encounter a “wall of rejection.” She resolved not to blame her query letters or her lack of connections, telling herself that she simply had to write a better book, because it was “the only thing in my control.” That and the inspired audacity of her pitch.

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