Edison Bixby is wealthy, handsome, and, due to a traumatic brain injury, impulsively rude. He’s also a brilliant insurance investigator who solves baffling crimes by figuring out how the design of the man-made world around us makes them possible. Enter Wally Nash: a struggling actor hired to keep Bixby from offending everyone he meets.

Their first case together looks like a simple accident. Caroline Crowley took a nasty fall down a staircase at a shopping mall in front of dozens of witnesses. Video clearly shows the deadly misstep. But Bixby is certain she was murdered by design, subtly manipulated into causing her own demise. The mall itself made the crime intentional, if not inevitable.

Now Bixby must prove his outrageous theory before a very cunning killer gets others on his hit list to murder themselves, too.

I found ‘Murder By Design‘, the first book in Lee Goldberg’s new series, a little overwhelming. 

I was fascinated by Edison Bixby’s ability to see the designed environment as shaping, sometimes even determining a person’s behaviour to the extent that a building can become an accomplice to a murder. The examples Lee Goldberg came up with, where the design of the built environment manipulated people’s behaviour, were numerous, clever, convincing, and often amusing.

The pace of the book was so rapid and relentless that I could feel the wind in my hair as I read. It was a sugar-rush of a book, lubricated by humour, most of which I enjoyed. I particularly liked the insider jokes about crime novels and the shaping of TV scripts for crime shows.

The characters were cartoonish but fun. Bixby’s flamboyance was exceeded only by his breathtaking arrogance. I enjoyed his passionate disdain for poor design and watching him take apart unpleasant people.

The story was told from the point of view of Bixby’s assistant, Wally. Wally sees himself as a great actor who hasn’t been discovered yet. He turned his job as Bixby’s assistant into a series of performances. Wally was even stranger than Bixby. He was a man so wrapped up in a fantasy about his own outstanding talent that he’d become impervious to reality. I know that the combination of Bixby and Wally was meant to set up a series of comic contrasts, but I found seeing Bixby’s bizarre behaviour through Wally’s self-deluding eyes a little dizzying at times. 

The book was clever and made me smile, but it was so over-the-top that I struggled to stay connected with it.