We Interrupt this Broadcast

227 pages. Octavo (8 1/2" x 5 3/4") bound in original publisher's black paper with red gilt to spine in original pictorial jacket. First edition. Beck 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. Condition: A near fine copy in like jacket.