In Cowherd’s novel, a divorced, out-of-shape reporter joins a gym looking for a new start and befriends a hyper-fit octogenarian who, decades earlier, murdered his own wife.

Jack Doherty’s life has seen better days—his marriage of 15 years crumbles when he walks in on his wife, Beth, fellating next-door neighbor Dan Henson at a New Year’s Eve party. Now divorced and alone at the age of 45, he finds that his once-promising career as a journalist is imperiled as well—his employer, the Baltimore Herald, is eager to replace him with a younger and cheaper version of himself. To revitalize his languishing life (and lose the excess weight he’s accumulated over the years), he decides to join a local gym, where he not only finds a crew of friends but also becomes romantically involved with Courtney Mancini, a nurse and single mom whose previous marriage also ended due to her spouse’s brazen infidelities. For all Courtney’s beauty, the big sensation at the gym is an impossibly fit 80-year-old, a man indefatigably devoted to a punishing workout regimen that would humble a person one-quarter his age; he’s an “octogenarian fitness guru,” hilariously portrayed by the author. Thirty years earlier, this same man, Alejandro Ramon Maldonado (the “wondrous geezer” now goes by the name Anthony Maldon), killed his wife, Carmen, with a cast-iron skillet while wearing bright red oven mitts, and he came to be known as the “Oven Mitts Killer.” Maldon is the most inventive feature of Cowherd’s largely formulaic story, which is a kind of pastiche of old plotlines lifted from popular cinema. Jack tries to get a story out of this peculiar man who emerged after 25 years in prison as an age-defying fitness enthusiast—the “Adonis of the adult diaper set”—and student of Eastern philosophy. Unfortunately, too much of the story lacks originality and freshness, and Jack’s path to renewal is tiresomely predictable. Maldon is such a comically well-drawn character that his presence in the novel nearly redeems its literary shortcomings, but, in the main, this is a corny and cliche-ridden tale.

A hoary rehash of old tropes dotted with flashes of comic brilliance.