The fifth Clare Carlson book shows us the TV news producer once more investigating stories as well as presenting them. Clare was an award-winning journalist who now usually stays behind the cameras, but sometimes she gets involved in a hard-hitting New York crime story. IT’S NEWS TO ME unsettles Clare’s life when a new boss is installed by the TV station, and Clare is asked which of her colleagues should be fired. A murder on a Manhattan street is a distraction, and Clare plays this up for all its worth.
Riley Hunt seemed to be the ideal eager college student, helping others and making friends. But someone got angry enough that she wound up dead. Could this be a random act of violence? The police seem too keen to see it that way. Clare discovers that Riley had a boyfriend who is the son of the police chief. But she had other connections, dodgy ones, and they could equally be to blame.
The crime story has some interesting angles, including the PTSD affecting returned soldiers. Various locations are visited, with some nice park scenes that give the reader and the characters a moment to breathe.
Clare once again comes across as more like a man than a woman, eating meat and fat, thinking briefly of her figure before ignoring the thought. She’s on the far side of a few marriages, yet a close friend keeps setting her up for dates with men, who are more randomly selected every week. I don’t see an experienced journalist opening her mouth about her big story to anyone, I just don’t. I also don’t know why she secretly meets a hacker to ask him to do internet searching that any media journalist today does by routine. The office junior would do that research for her.
Personalities and dilemmas are the core of this crime drama, in which making the nightly news can cause the next part of the story to happen. R.G. Belsky is an experienced newspaper journalist who understands the all too human motivations behind murders and the despair of the bereaved. I feel where IT’S NEWS TO ME excels is in presenting the tragedy of a promising life cut short, a family without a daughter. Like Clare Carlson, I wanted to help them find the reason behind the crime.
When Riley Hunt—a beautiful, smart, popular student at Easton College in Manhattan—is brutally murdered, it becomes a big story for TV newswoman Clare Carlson.
After days of intense media coverage, a suspect is caught: a troubled Afghanistan war veteran with a history of violent and unstable behavior. The suspect's mother, however, comes to Clare with new evidence that might prove her son's innocence.
As Clare digs deeper into the puzzling case, she learns new information: Riley had complained about being stalked in the days before her murder, she was romantically involved with two different men—the son of a top police official and the son of a prominent underworld boss—and she had posted her picture on an escort service's website offering paid dates with wealthy men.
Soon, Clare becomes convinced that Riley Hunt's death is more than just a simple murder case—and that more lives, including her own, are now in danger until she uncovers the true story.
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