Kill the Messenger

by Elizabeth Daniels Squire

Legendary newspaper publisher Isaiah Justice, owner of The Defender, is going to miss his paper's biggest story someone has laced his bourbon with cyanide.
His murder conveniently coincides with the takeover bid from a large, shady corporation. But many people family, friends and employees-wanted the feisty patriarch dead. He had power. He had women. And he had dirt on just about everyone in town.
Amid death threats and more corpses, Howard Justice, the Old Man's heir, teams up with the paper's top reporter and the Old Man's beautiful assistant in a breathless race to find the killer and save the paper... while dodging their own command appearance in the obituaries.

Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Elizabeth Daniels Squire, more commonly known as Liz, has been an aptitude tester, a reporter, a nationally syndicated columnist, and wrote mysteries about a sleuth who uses memory tricks to solve murders. One of her stories won an Agatha. Tragically, Liz died February 25, 2001, but her work will live on forever.

Reviews

[Mark Stangroome · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a reasonable yet convoluted story that runs through this novel. A newspaper owner in an American town/ small city is murdered by poison in his whisky. The owner is not a particularly nice man, a womaniser, a tyrannical father and a boss who is hard but fair. The owner was very much a man with a one-track mind, the newspaper is not just the most important thing in his life it is also second, third, fourth and fifth.

At the time of the murder the newspaper was subject to a hostile takeover, most probably by a group with connections to organised crime. So is the murder because of current events or does something from the past threaten family unity?

The story is good but my problem is the writing style. There are far too many short sentences; the back of the book contains an excerpt from the story and the last paragraph there has 28 words but 5 sentences. This writing style is fine for areas of a story with action but not for a whole book.