Broadcast Blues by R.G. Belsky

RG Belsky. Newsroom drama. Clare Carlson. What could possibly go wrong?

The sixth Clare Carlson book and all previous outings have been  winners that the MRB boys have enjoyed. Yeah, we're biased. 

A prize winner journalist now an NYC TV reporter and news director who is approaching her 50^th birthday and reflecting on her three previous failures in marriage. She can’t stand her boss and the TV station is up for sale. But a juicy scoop might do wonders for killing the sale. The newsroom is a constant setting for comfort and chaos. The juicy scoop she needs falls into her lap when a former star cop, Wendy Kyle (who got dumped for slugging a higher officer) and now a high-profile PI is killed. It’s NYC so you can bet that crooked cops and politicians will be at the core of the investigation. Kyle’s PI business specialized in catching husbands fooling around that helped cement her poor reputation with the NYPD; there was no shortage of higher ups who would be just fine if she was wiped from the board. Clare’s investigation chased a story with little evidence to support her theory that Kyle’s death was more than a random killing.

Belsky is a proven winner. Great story, intriguing characters, realistic dialogue, believable settings combined with a healthy bit of his trademarked humor. Tell us if you saw the conclusion of this book while reading. I didn’t. Broadcast Blues can be a stand-alone book, but it might help understand Clare if you read these in order.

Thanks to Netgalley for the advance reviewer copy.

 ECD

 

Broadcast Blues

Admittedly, I have eclectic reading tastes that often take me away from the blog’s main them of murder mysteries, espionage stories, adventure novels, and thrillers. Recently, I've read a couple historical novels such as The American Daughters and The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. There’s the 1930’s Nobel Prize winning work of Sinclair Lewis with Babbitt, a recent Pulitzer Prize winning novel for fiction (Trust by Hernan Diaz), an autobiography from Prince Henry (Spare), nonfiction histories of 5,000 years of Chinese history (From Yao to Mao), another history about the zeppelin era (His Majesty’s Airship), and a Pulitzer Prize winning biography about Robert Oppenheimer, American Prometheus. 

Of course, I’ve never abandoned mystery novels. However, when I’ve been away from our primary theme for very long, it always feels so good to come back to a good murder mystery, especially when it involves an ongoing saga of a protagonist I’ve come to enjoy. It was like coming home after being away too long and sitting down in my favorite chair and reading for my own joy. That was exactly my situation when I learned that R. G. Belsky was about to publish a new novel, Broadcast Blues, the sixth in a series about Clare Carlson, a television reporter and news director in NYC. She is a most compelling character. Now approaching her 50^th birthday, being a three-time divorce who is between relationships, dealing with a boss she hates, and facing the possible sale of her tv station, Carlson is desperate to have a new tawdry sensational story to chase down. The consistent thing about Clare is that there is always chaos happening around her in the Channel 10 newsroom. This story dives into NYC politics and crooked cops. Primarily, the story surrounds the murder of Wendy Kyle, who had been fired from her job in the NYPD, who had a very mixed police history of being praised for her good work and being severely reprimanded for overstepping her proper boundaries. She went on to become a notorious private investigator who specialized in catching wealthy husbands in the act of infidelity. She continued to be an irritant to the NYPD, so there were lots of people who would have been happy to see her dead. However, Clare seemed to be chasing a case for which there was no supporting evidence other than her intuition and need for a new story.

 

I could not put this one down. Belsky hits a nice balance between some good humor in the dialogue and real danger to his characters in the plot. I did not see the resolution of the main plot and subplots until the story got tied together at the end – didn’t see it coming. While Broadcast Blues could be a stand-alone novel, it’s my preference to read about Clare Carlson’s adventures in the order that the novels were published. This novel gets my strongest recommendation.

The Last Scoop

The Last Scoop is the seventh novel By R. G. Belsky that have been reviewed in this blog, which means that they guys at Men Reading Books really likes his writing. He’s kept up the great writing with this new novel, the third in his series about Clare Carlson, a former Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, now the news director of a television channel in New York. Except, despite having promised herself she would always be truthful, Clare finds herself compelled to tell lie on top of lie, which she knows is bound to catch up with her, starting with the very story that won her the Pulitzer. That story was about the disappearance of Lucy Devlin

Now there has been a new murder. A former colleague and Clare’s former editor, Marty Barlow, was an old and washed up reporter who was still hot after one last big story. But, he was brutally murdered before he could reveal the fruits of his research into the dirty world that touches both politics and New York real estate. Clare felt compelled to pursue Marty’s work with the scant clues that he left behind which suggested he had been pursuing a serial killer that no one else knew existed. Meanwhile, her interest was still caught on Lucy, and if her unscrupulous behavior in that case was ever discovered, then her career would be at an end. Carlson is a most curious character, one who stands for truth while covering up a trail of lies, one who is impulsively pulled into love affairs with the wrong guys, but one who is incredibly consistent at uncovering the secrets of others. She is very loose about some standards, but obsessive about others.

Carlson rides a line between the politically powerful and the wealthiest of real estate magnates. Belsky has crowded his way the power rotation of my 10 favorite authors. He’s rubbing elbows with Michael Connelly, Daniel Sylva, Louise Penny, and C.J. Box, James Lee Burke, John Grisham, Ken Bruen, Robert Crais and Greg Iles. That is high praise for Belsky. If you’re a fan of murder mysteries, then start this book which you won’t put down until the story is over.