Luke Goebel

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending April 19, 2026

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A fever dream, Kill Dick is a literary thriller that plunges into the chaos of Los Angeles where addiction, privilege, and corruption combust.

At nineteen, Susie Vogelman should be she’s an NYU dropout with no responsibilities, endless prescription pills, and a Brentwood estate to waste away in. But Los Angeles has other plans. A string of brutal murders targeting show more addicts spreads through the city, and Susie’s ivory tower begins to crumble. The headlines point too close to her father’s ties to an opioid empire, a sinister secret society, and her own complicity in the systems holding it all together.

Then there’s Peter Holiday, a disgraced professor running a rehab scam so audacious it’s almost admirable. When their lives collide, Susie and Peter are dragged into a web of privilege, corruption, and violence, where every escape leads deeper into the rot.

Dark, satirical, and razor-sharp, Kill Dick is a modern literary thriller that unflinchingly dissects wealth, exploitation, and the perilous line between survival and self-destruction.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Health scammers, like Peter Holiday in this story, might be the lowest scum on this wide, green Earth. Preying on those desperate for their very lives...! My mother's father fell for the Laetrile scam in the 1970s. Luckily he survived more than a few years after it was exposed to all as a hoax, but it cemented my powerful disdain for health scammers as it was an expensive lesson. Fast-forward from my family's 1970s to Susie Vogelman, our PoV character, in a circle of hell called the glittering world of too-rich too-dimwitted 2016 LA.

What's worse than an addict without morals or boundaries? Worse even than an enabler of the addict? The addict turned enabler. Susie, who apparently never so much as once looked into a mirror that showed her anything except her surface, is a participant in a lot of different kinds of enabling in this story. It's very well done, it never lets the pace of revelations slacken, but it also never once shows even a glimmer of realization in Susie or her coterie of criminally negligent creeps. But their surfaces are pretty! And their credit cards are limitless!

I wanted to shake Susie into awareness of her hollowness, lest she implode causing still further damage. But Author Goebel is careful to make this world honest by giving it consequences despite no one in the cast being anything but appalling. Bad things are going to happen, and I didn't care about the consequences to any of the cast just to the folks who were victimized by the cast. The suppurating wounds of vapidity exacerbated by the absence of empathy (honestly, I'm not sure Susie in particular even has a theory of mind) in every character are never allowing anyone to escape dire consequences.

When they come I was deeply surprised to feel...sad is too strong, sympathetic is in the wrong emotional register, wistful is too kindly meant...to not feel triumphant? I think that's closer. I was eager for the comeuppances to be passed around, and Peter the scumbag to get seconds. After all, this was the moment that the country saw Trump installed in entirely the wrong kind of government housing. What use is fiction of not to redress horrifying imbalances?

Showing them to us, forcing us to see that the rot is there even when it's plastered over, and there are ways you can recognize it despite the glittering surface. Less wish fulfillment than cautionary tale. It's well done. Author Goebel (Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours via the deeply cool publisher FC2) has storytelling chops. He has very cool film scripts in his CV, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Anne Hathaway in them. His current publisher is Kate Gale's always interesting and frequently tastemaking Red Hen Press. Given these bona fides why is this not a full-five review?

Because I got uneasy as I crested the halfway mark, feeling I was still outside Susie's world with my sarcastic voyeur of a guide being invited to laugh at and judge these buffoons. It's what they deserve! is implicit in each and every moment I'm in the story's flow. Which, fair—it is indeed what they deserve; but is it your point, Author Goebel, to stop there or is it to force me-the-reader into looking deep into the shine of these surfaces and ask myself "why are you still here with these tacky people." I didn't think it was terribly clear what your purpose was; the only reason that was an issue is its consequence of popping me out of the story-flow to examine the whole read again and again.

That's a big ask, but your story is a national bestseller so I guess it worked. I'm glad it did, and does, and will do the trick again in future. show less

First, let me just note that the writer and his editor apparently don't know that "led' is the past tense of "lead".

There isn't a subtle page in this entire book, hardly even a subtle sentence. Written by a screenwriter, who apparently has some bona fides in the areas of substance abuse, addiction, and rich people, this book is bursting with overblown descriptions of just about everything. The Los Angeles atmosphere, from skid row to the homes of the wealthy, is quite well etched. It is the show more plot and the narration that have issues. The "author" of the story, who tells it alternately in first and third-person, is the NYU dropout, wannabe modern artist daughter of a lawyer who has made tons of money defending the Sickler family against suits related to the drug OxyContin. The author has cleverly changed "Sackler" to "Sickler" here, but apparently OxyContin is fine to use! The "Dick" of the title is Dick Sickler, whose daughter the wannabe artist went to school with and may be in love with. With her narration, it's not easy to be too sure about anything. It just goes on and on, name dropping modern artists and other folks who will largely be known only to academics and some rich people. And while that is part of the point of this story, it just gets old after a while, accompanied it is by a lot of preachy paragraphs. And it's not that it is preaching against the wrong stuff. The author correctly identifies that this country is now ruled by the ultra-wealthy and that the rest of us are basically guinea pigs for their experiments in how to get even richer. The story is set (with a lot of hindsight, of course, during the 2020 election where the "Orange candidate" and the "female candidate" are (again, the author is correct) giving Americans the worst choices Presidential election history!

So, to cut to the point, if so much is right in this book--at least in its condemnation of the power of the wealthy, why is the book not that successful? First, it seems to be written to the small group of people who will get all the references without looking them up. I read the book through Libby on my Kindle Fire, so looking them up was simple. Most folks won't bother. It bothers me that this mediocre book got so much advance hype when far better authors struggle to sell a few hundred copies.

Second, the book really doesn't deliver on its promise in the end. No spoilers, but the ending seems a bit of a cop-out and almost beside the point, as if the author doesn't really want to take us--at least not firsthand--to the logical conclusion of where all his ranting is leading us. There are some good scenes along the way, but they don't quite add up. Third, the book's shifts between characters seem sort of random. This book needed a really good editor--not just for the grammar mistake pointed out above--but to tighten the story so it would have more effect. It reads like a first draft. show less