Off the Air, by Christina Estes

[mrissa]

 Review copy provided by the publisher.

 

This is a cozy mystery about a TV journalist investigating the murder of Rush Limbaugh.

 

He's not called Rush Limbaugh, of course; enough of the details are changed that it's a different shape of story. But this is very much a "right-wing blowhard gets poisoned; plucky TV journalist pursues the story and also tries to promote her own career." Estes is definitely getting some mileage out of how satisfying it is to watch the loathsome people who gather around such a horror show snap at each other over the corpse.

 

In the interest of making the protagonist not too saintly to be real, she comes out a bit the other side, whining about how hard it is to do her job and seething with jealousy for a local rival. Estes's enthusiasm for the Phoenix setting comes through positively, but I didn't actually like her detective as much as I wanted to. I felt she was supposed to come off beleaguered and instead read self-pitying to me, and on the whole I don't really want to spend as much time with loathsome people as this book required me to do.