The Ugly Truth

March 18, 2019
Orr’s delightfully comic third Riley Ellison mystery (after 2018’s The Good Byline) finds 25-year-old Riley, the obituary writer for the Tuttle Times of Tuttle Corner, Va., assigned to do the obit for Justin Balzichek, a murder victim about whom no one has anything nice to say. As Riley observes, “I didn’t believe that anybody outside of a Bond villain could be so one-dimensionally bad.” Meanwhile, the abandoned car of wealthy socialite Greer Mountbatten, the wife of prominent Washington, D.C., lobbyist Dale Mountbatten, is discovered just inside Tuttle County. The next day, Greer’s body turns up along the James River. Riley’s digging into the life of the thuggish Balzichek uncovers a link between his death and Greer’s. Providing counterpoint to the crime solving are the highly amusing email exchanges between Riley, who has recently broken up with her boyfriend, and Regina H., Personal Romance Concierge™ of the dating service Click.com. Quirky characters enliven the carefully constructed plot. Agent: Margaret Sutherland Brown, Emma Sweeney Agency.

April 15, 2019
A relentless obituary writer gets a little too involved in her work while investigating murders in a small Virginia town filled with big personalities. Tuttle Corner is rocked when not one, but two people are murdered within a single week. Not that folks were too surprised when town miscreant Justin Balzichek met an unsavory end--for him, the question had always been not whether but when--but it's quite a surprise that noted lobbyist Dale Mountbatten's wife, Greer, is dispatched so shortly afterward. When obituarist and generally curious person Riley Ellison goes to the local funeral home to get the facts of the unsolved cases, her efforts are hampered because her friendly funeral director has been replaced by one Ashley Campbell, a mischievous grouch who seems determined to use Riley to express his own problems. Yet Riley persists in investigating, if only because the murders appear to have chased restaurateur Rosalee Belanger out of town, and she can't live another day without Rosalee's croissants. Though Riley's colleague Holman is typically a human computer, more focused on the practical than the potential, Riley notices that he's fixated on the murders as well, and she realizes that Rosalee has the same place in Holman's heart that croissants have in hers. It's just as well that the current cases are occupying Riley. Her colleague and friend Flick has shown new interest in the sudden death of Riley's grandfather several years before, and the more recent murders take Riley's mind at least briefly off fears of what Flick may discover. Another distraction, though perhaps less welcome, is the reinvention of Regina H., who previously self-identified as Riley's Personal Romance ConciergeTM and is actively rebranding herself as a life coach with #allthehashtags (but #noneoftheanswers, according to Riley). Orr fails to capture the magic of earlier series entries (The Bad Break, 2018, etc.), and her humor is less inventive in a franchise that remains good but not great.

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