By Greg Olear. Harper, 288 pp, $17.99, softcover

A pop-culture period piece populated by shallow characters with cruel motives, Greg Olear’s debut novel, Totally Killer, sounds like it should be filed beside Bret Easton Ellis. To help guide us to that conclusion, Olear even references Less Than Zero on page 3. But lacking Ellis’s razor-sharp wit and social conscience, Olear misses the mark as a satirist.

Totally Killer is a detective story set in recession-stricken 1991 New York, centring on the employment woes of nubile, doomed-to-death 23-year-old Taylor Schmidt. Through the eyes of her former roommate, the lovelorn Todd Lander, we watch Taylor’s futile job search lead her to Quid Pro Quo, an employment agency whose tag line is Jobs to Kill For. From the agency’s name (which translates as “tit for tat”) to its employees (who overact like sexy villains in a Bond movie), we know Quid Pro Quo is bad news. It’s not long before Taylor receives a job placement—with a crime-novel publisher, no less—and her agency requests payback in the most literal way: she must create a new opening in the job market by making a hit.

Written by someone else, Totally Killer could have been a hilarious send-up, but Olear is too painfully self-aware and eager to establish his cool status to really deliver the goods. He offers frequent, smug descriptions of how things were “back then”. He incessantly drops the names of songs, films, and celebrities to prove his ’90s pop-culture cred, and often refers to the flannel-clad side characters as “hipsters”—an anachronism, since in 1991 the term still referred to 1940s jazz cats.

Olear’s main characters are only slightly less flimsy. Taylor goes through men like candy for no convincing reason: supposedly her hero is Anaïs Nin, too intellectual a choice for a character who says nothing intelligent. As for Todd, we know little about him except that he’s a slacker who desperately wants to be Taylor’s 75th lay. When Taylor and Todd meet their respective fates, it’s hard to care, as neither of them seem like real people.

“Nobody takes us seriously.…Our whole generation,” one character gripes early on. Totally Killer won’t help with that.