We Interrupt This Broadcast

November 3, 1997
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.

November 1, 1997
The rather sleazy quarters of a Seattle classical music station provide the focus for the latest concoction from the author of Death in a Deck Chair (Ivy, 1987). When Alice Jordan, recently deserted by her husband, lands a job at KLEG, she discovers a body in the back room. Easy reading.

October 1, 1997
Shy heroine Alice Jordan doesn't even appear until chapter 2 of this contemporary cozy set in Seattle, home of the very local KLEG-AM, the last AM classical music station on the dial. Alice has just taken a job there, only to discover that her predecessor was found very dead, folded into the studio's sofa bed, and that her coworkers are as dweebish a collection of folk as can be imagined: a paranoid if mellifluous-voiced announcer; a passive/aggressive office manager; a nearly invisible record librarian. And the star voice of the station, Teresa, Queen of the Night, has never been seen by anyone, even the station's brother-and-sister-act owners. (She sends her shift in on tape.) A RuPaul clone, more than one right-wing crazy, and a fiery Latina success story compete to keep quiet but competent Alice off center stage until the very end, when all is solved and her future looks a lot better than the station's ((Reviewed October 1, 1997))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1997, American Library Association.)