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MURDER OFF MIKE
by Joyce Krieg
Thomas Dunne Books, April 2003
288 pages
$23.95
ISBN: 0312310269


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

MURDER OFF MIKE won the 2002 St. Martin's Press/Malice Domestic Contest for Best Traditional Mystery. It was also nominated for the Agatha for Best First Novel. My only question is why?

Shauna J Bogart has a talk show on a local Sacramento California radio station every afternoon. She tries to have discussions with the weirdoes that have nothing better to do than to telephone complete strangers to tell them that strange black helicopters are landing on their roof, or ferret ownership should be legal, or that the aliens from Roswell assassinated JFK.

One call is different. A man with a strange accent says he saw two men go into an apartment across from the state capitol and he thinks something odd is happening. Shauna goes to the location and finds it is the apartment of Dr Hipster, the 9 - 11pm DJ, and that he has been killed.

Dr Hipster was Shauna's mentor, so she gets involved in trying to prove that this was not suicide. He had phoned her the previous day and said something strange. Shauna tries to find the tape with that phone call on it, but apparently her tape has been accidentally put in the wrong place and erased and the master tape has been clipped, so there is no record of that call.

We get much information about how a small radio station is at the mercy of the big guys because Bill Clinton signed a bill allowing media ownership, too much about everyone listening to Rush Limbaugh, lots about the Sacramento Jazz Festival and how to fix a radio contest, but not very interesting characters.

If you are a fan of shock radio or talk radio in any of its forms, perhaps you will like this book. I thought there was too much detail about running a station and not enough reason for us to care about any of the characters or what happens to them.

Reviewed by Barbara Franchi, March 2004

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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