We Interrupt This Broadcast

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 Aliceís predecessor Joe Costello hadnít 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, Joeís body is found inside a convertible sofa in a storage area. Alice finds that Joeís death by misadventure is only the beginning of the mystery.From Library JournalThe 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.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus ReviewsBeck takes a break from her overgalvanized Jane da Silva series (Cold Smoked, 1995, etc.) for a plunge into the even more frenetic world of KLEG-AM, Seattle's dying also-ran classical radio station. New advertising account executive Alice Jordan, who's cadged the job from Caroline Payne Parker, the station's much-married co-owner and nominal manager, arrives on the scene to discover that the program director is a militant vinyl Luddite, the receptionist a megalomaniac, the evening announcer a has-been romeo, the overnight announcer (Teresa, Queen of the Night'') an audiotaped misterioso nobody's ever laid eyes on, and the other owner, Caroline's brother Franklin, a resentful hothead who's ready to sell the whole kit and caboodle to the first psycho who comes up with half a million dollars. About the only person around with any business sense is ad sales manager Ed Costello, and he's dead--folded up in a Murphy bed, presumably by somebody who didn't take kindly to his experiments in prostitution and blackmail. So Alice, whose main qualification for amateur sleuthing is that she's not nuts--weepy and neurotic, maybe, but not nuts''--ends up solving the murder, though, in keeping with the zany spirit of the enterprise, that's far from her intention. A tightly wound farce whose dim view of the station dweebs and ditzes is pursued with comical consistency to the very last line. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.