Stew Gribnitz is a brilliant advertising copywriter with impulse control issues, an utter disdain for authority and an unresolved demi-Oedipal complex (he'd like to murder his father but has no sexual designs on his mother). When the first act of his new creative director is to dump our hero's best work into a garbage bin, Stew's immediate impulse (which, of course, he can't control) is to do unspeakable things to his new boss's necktie while he's still wearing it. The next day, when the necktie guy is found brutally murdered, Stew is brought in for questioning by the NYPD. He's released thanks to an air-tight alibi, but not before his face is emblazoned on the cover of the New York tabloids, declaring him to be a cross between Son of Sam and Jack the Ripper. Stew becomes a Madison Avenue untouchable and a New York City pariah, except to his father who declares that seeing his son on the front page of his favorite paper is the first time that he's ever done anything to make him proud. Stew gets a gig as a part-time advertising consultant to a billionaire publisher running for Governor of Connecticut who's twenty points behind in the polls. When the publisher's private plane does a nosedive into Long Island Sound, Stew is the only one who knows that his deceased client had been receiving death threats from his opponent, a former FBI agent whose brother is a mob enforcer. Stew is convinced he'll be the next victim and the authorities are convinced he's a multiple murderer. The only way to clear his name is to find the real killer or killers, a task, well beyond his skill set, made even more difficult because the FBI, the NYPD, several suburban police jurisdictions and a homicidal hitwoman are all out to GET GRIBNITZ.