The Ugly Truth: A Riley Ellison Mystery

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. [em]Agent: Margaret Sutherland Brown, Emma Sweeney Agency. (June) [/em]