We Interrupt This Broadcast
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Alice Jordan's dentist husband has just run off with his hygienist and she is desperate for a job. Because Alice has done some volunteer work for the symphony, she manages to talk herself into a job as a commissioned ad rep for a Seattle classical music station. The station was kept alive by its wealthy owner for many years, but her heirs are fighting about the future of the station.
KLEG is so mismanaged that Alice's predecessor Joe Costello hadn't even bothered to resign. He just disappeared and no one, including his unhappy wife, found it odd that he just drifted away. Cryptic messages had been left on his answering machine and his few accounts had been neglected. A week into the job, Joev?s body is found inside a convertible sofa in a storage area. Alice finds that Joev?s death by misadventure is only the beginning of the mystery.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The author of the Jane DaSilva mysteries (Cold Smoked, 1995) enters a new milieu with this comic tale of a beleaguered classical radio station in Seattle. A dinosaur in the jungle of popular culture, station KLEG was established by a local arts patron and is now owned--and supported by--heirs Caroline and Franklin Payne. Ditzy, oft-married Caroline and her curmudgeonly lawyer brother Franklin are at odds about everything, including KLEG's future. After the body of a sleazy sales rep, who at Franklin's behest had been secretly looking for a buyer, is found fatally shot in the station's sofabed, police and station personnel soon discover that the dead man had been running an escort service. Looking through his files, newly hired Alice Jordan, a likable divorcee with an interest in true crime, uncovers a connection to a creepy neo-Nazi. While the plot here stirs only lukewarm interest, the cast, particularly the eccentric, mainly antediluvian KLEG staff, prove ready vehicles for Beck's edgy, sarcastic humor. A few of them are painted too broadly (receptionist Judy is unrelievedly bitchy; over-the-hill disk jockey Bob is egotistically smarmy and Caroline is annoyingly naive), but Alice, though not often on center stage, is appealing. Beck delivers nicely on the mystery of the true identity of a sultry-voiced disk jockey, Theresa, Queen of the Night, and offers up a pleasingly antic finale in the KLEG studio.
