Hi fellow mystery lover! My name is Mary Kennedy, and I write the Talk Radio Mysteries for Penguin Random House. I’m excited to tell you about DEATH OF A SHADY SHRINK, book five in the series.
But first you need to know how the Talk Radio series came about. My agent sold it on the basis of five words; Frasier Meets Murder She Wrote. Why Frasier? Because Dr. Maggie Walsh is a radio talk show psychologist. Remember Frasier saying, “I’m listening,” as he took phone calls at the radio station in Seattle?
Dr. Maggie does the same thing with the help of her trusty producer, Vera Mae. Vera Mae screens the calls and produces the live radio show. Why Murder She Wrote? Because just like Jessica Fletcher, she solves a murder in every book. Sometimes two!
You might wonder why a Manhattan psychologist would close up her practice and move to sunny south Florida to become a radio talk show host. Here’s the Cliff notes version. Dr. Maggie was “sick of the cold, sick of the traffic and if truth be told, sick of listening to peoples’ problems all day long.” I know that might be shocking to hear, but Dr. Maggie is a straight shooter.
Being a radio talk show host at a small station (WYME Radio) means you’re clinging like a barnacle to the bottom rungs of show business. Vera Mae tells her, “You’re just like Dr. Phil, without the money, fame or recognition.”
Wow. Vera Mae Atkins certainly knows how to flatter a girl. Vera Mae is a true southerner who wears her hair in a Marge Simpson beehive and believes “the higher the hair, the closer to God.” But never underestimate her. A proud graduate of the University of Miami school of journalism, she’s won some local Emmys for her hard-hitting features on politics and social issues.
Dr. Maggie has no illusions about life on the D list. As she says, “I learned not to take myself too seriously when I heard I was running neck and neck with Bob Figgs of the Swine Report in the Nielsen ratings. Who wants to run neck and neck with a pig?”
Who indeed?
Dr. Maggie’s colleagues at WYME Radio office plenty of opportunities for comedy. There’s Irina, the eastern European receptionist who occasionally does copywriting at the station, even though she mangles the English language. When she was asked to write a thirty second ad for a local funeral home, she came up with “We will leave no stone unturned to serve you.”
And of course, Bob Figgs, the star of the Swine Report who takes his job way too seriously. He thinks his shows are fascinating and listens to them over and over in the break room. He can’t understand why his show hasn’t been picked up by a major news outlet like CNN or NPR.
Cyrus Still is the station manager, has the final say-so on Dr. Maggie’s guests and sometimes forces her to interview his friends on the show. So, Dr. Maggie—along with her audience—has to struggle through a show on root rot (“A terror you didn’t expect”) and irritable bowel problems. (“When you gotta go, you gotta go.”)
One bright spot in Dr. Maggie’s life is Lark, her roommate who is a devoted vegan and animal lover. Her pampered pooch, Pugsley, appears in all the books and sometimes jumps in to solve the murder. Or at least protect Dr. Maggie from being a homicide victim herself.
Detective Rafe Martino is a sometime love interest in the series who has an ongoing battle with Dr. Maggie over solid police work vs psychological insights. They meet in the first book, DEAD AIR, when Maggie is frog marched out of the studio for disobeying an “officer of the law.” In her defense, she had no idea that Rafe was a detective. He was wearing Dockers and a Polo shirt. He was working undercover, but how was she to know that? Of course, it was a fortunate meeting because their relationship continues—and develops--throughout the series.
I think you’ll enjoy the whole series, but you can read the books as a stand-alone mystery.
So welcome aboard and happy reading!
Mary Kennedy is a licensed psychologist and the author of the Talk Radio Mysteries and the Dream Club Mysteries. She’s written nearly fifty novels and has four million copies in print. Her first thirty-five books were young adult novels published by Scholastic nationwide and in several countries. She lives in the northeast with an eccentric cat. She’s tried unsuccessfully to psychoanalyze him but she remains optimistic.
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