Off The Air by Christina Estes (2024)
A fast, mostly entertaining read, but a very mixed bag of the good, the bad and the ugly.....
First thing to like - author Christina Estes, an award winning Phoenix TV reporter certainly knows the territory. She plunges you into the the super hectic life of a local TV station "live on the street" reporter. Jolene Garcia. Jolene spends her days scrambling around the city for a hot scoop to make the evening news, along with her equally ambitious competitors from rival stations. If the book had solely concentrated on this part of the story - the day to day frenzied life of a journalist, it might've been on its way to a much higher rating than I'm giving it. A murder mystery rocks the city with discovery of the poisoning of controversial local talk show host Larry Lemmon,, a sort of local Tucker Carlson-Rush LImbaugh right-wing wanna-be. Jolene craves to make the story her very own exclusive since she did the last interview with Lemmon before his death. But she's scooped at every turn by "JJ", her hated glamorous and gorgeous rival. J.J.'s the embodiment of the TV news-babe in Don Henley's "Dirty Laundry" song - the bubble headed blonde who can tell you about a plane crash with a gleam in her eye.....
More pressure falls upon Jolene from her station manager and news director, who demand nightly fresh breaking stories to feed the station's growing social media outlets of facebook, instagram and twitter.
And here's where "Off The Air" starts to fly off the rails a little in terms of our investment in Jolene's hunt for news. She quickly becomes unlikable and obnoxious in a series of series of foolhardy, unprofessional and highly questionable maneuvers to hunt down her story. Her reckless interviewing and reporting antagonizes her subjects and angers her confidential police source. The only time a reader might feel empathy for her is when she's harassed by some repulsive creep trying to date her.
The pacing of the book also begins to stop cold as it takes time outs to indulge in some Phoenix lore and recaps of past true current events that relate to Jolene's tribulations.
And I should warn that those who don't care for today's all too real toxic politics inserted into novels, will see it on full display here. But given the Larry Lemmon character, it's unavoidable.......which makes the mystery factor not very surprising since he was so roundly hated by everyone around him, there's an overabundance of likely suspects. (And that even includes some of his once ardent supporters who fell out of favor with him....)
As I said, the nuts 'n bolts, give-and-take of local TV news reporting makes fascinating reading, but Jolene's problematic behavior only muddies up the plot (most painfully in the big reveal finale.) But there's enough good stuff that made it a quick, diverting read. 3 stars (***)
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