Good story but I figured out 2 of the murders fairly easily. She built the story up with twists and turns but then the ending was kind of a letdown. The story kept my interest and she made most of the characters believable.

Murder at the Washington Tribune by Margaret Truman was a sad dissapointment to me. I suppose the author was going for sophistication. However, I like the hero (or heroine, or both) to be likable and veteran news reporter at the Trib, Joe Wilcox simply wasn't. Not only that, none of the characters in the book were, except Joe's wife Georgia, who he cheated on with the only other female character who was even remotely likeable, D.C. police detective Edith Vargas Swayze. Joe's TV news anchor daughter is constantly trying to steal stories from him and angry when he tries to protect his own news leads. Joe has a homicidal brother he hates who shows up after having spent forty years in a mental institution for brutally murdering a young girl. As a Christian, I may have over reacted, but the author has this brother, now calling himself Michael LaRue, fussy over serving wine and cheese when he finally gets Joe to visit his apartment. Michael wears tight fitting jeans and tops that reveal he's spending quite a bit of time at the gym, Michael also loves fine music and literature and meets with a woman who has similar interests, only that she has an interest in Michael that is totally unrequited. Michael does kill again in the book. He kills his drunken neighbor who makes the mistake of calling him gay. I thought there was a subtle suggestion that since Joe and the Michael were brought up in and ultra religious Christian home, Michale has somehow become homicidal because he had to surpress his homosexuality. This also didn't sit well with me

I'm not a big fan of these books, but this one was interesting to me as a former journalist. It's topical, with the recent cases of newspapers becoming the story themselves, and there are intriguing insights into the world of news gathering.

We had this book on CD and listened to it on a 10 hour trip. It held our interest.

Published over 15 years ago, this tale of backstage journalism in a changing media landscape that is reporting on what may be a series killer in the DC area seems very dated now with stifled dialog, but interesting, compels characters. However, I did enjoy the convoluted plotting that tied together for a satisfying ending.

Joe and Roberta Wilcox spend weeks trying to figure out who's responsible for two recent murders in Washington DC.

This is the first Truman book that I read after reading so much praise about her other DC crime books. Truman tells the story of a seasoned reporter who's likely at the end of his career and has little motivation. An easy book to read. I was actually expecting more of a revealing end to the book, I had high expectations and it wasn't so shocking.

I definitely have to say that Truman's description of a crime reporter job, what it entitles and the frustrations are very, very accurate. She didn't romanticize the job or added Hollywood like characteristics.

Margaret Truman mysteries are generally good, solid page turners. That was not the case for Murder at the Washington Tribune. Perhaps it is because the Tribune is ficticious ( maybe to avoid legal issues with the Washington Post?), but I found this mystery lacked the energy and pull most of the Capital Crimes mysteries have. The book is long...nearly 400 pages. While Trumans attention to detail is part of what makes her books good, this book is especially and unnecessarily wordy that adds nothing to the plot....Do we really need to know where a character's necklace came from? Who gave the editor the antique coat rack? How long a character napped before cocktails? Why does it matter that a woman's robe is freshly pressed when she comes downstairs for her morning coffee? I found myself wondering when the action was really going to begin. Even though the book was written in 2005, it seems dated. The lavicious descriptions of the young female characters physical attributes were almost uncomfortable to read, and the banter between the reporters and cops is full of racist, sexist and agist microagressions that just would not fly in the current workplace. Some of the characters were stereotypical caricatures....the Italian couple who run the neighborhood pizzeria; Wilcox's devoutly religous parents. Finally, I found Joe Wilcox's lamenting over feeling washed up at age 53 a bit implausible, though if current journalists partake in the multiple cocktail lunches described here, it is possible. All of this excess got in the way of the mystery, which was pretty obvious to me who did it early on. Not one of Truman's strongest reads.

Falls in the category of run-of-the-mill mystery novel. Nothing really suspenseful or interesting about it.

Too many ruminations by characters about things the reader doesn't care about. Perhaps they were to give the characters some depth and personality, but the introspections were boring.

The wife is as flat and static a character as they come.
The cop's divorce storyline was completely irrelevant, as is the daughter's love life.

A middling effort that seems to pile on details in place of plot. The descriptions are flat; the word choices and stilted dialogue is unbelievable; the coincidences are supposed to be red herrings I think, but are instead dead ends that not even the police or journalists are interested in pursuing; the only passions anyone in this novel have are for food and screwing; but most of all, there is no structure to the story, stuff just happens in no particular order.

Now some of this I could overlook, but I am taking off an accuracy star. I know DC pretty well and the city Truman describes simply does not exist. The strange love that her characters show for the truly terrible restaurant culture in DC makes me suspect that she was paid by the DC tourism council. Also, the book is suspiciously lily white for a story taking place in a city more than half Black and even in 2006 there was a stiff backbone of Latino and Somali neighborhoods within easy walking distance of all the action. Perhaps that is the one believable element to this novel; the police and news media only care when a couple of pretty white girls die close to the White House.

Also, if you are going to try and humanize your Hispanic characters by having them speak a little Spanish, and you don't actually know any Spanish yourself, I recommend having someone who knows the language either write that part or read what you think it should be. Don't just wing it...

This book is not holding my attention, I may pick it up at a later date but for now I'm gonna shelf it.

Once upon a time I read Margaret Truman mystery novels. I don't remember which ones they were, sadly, but I do remember liking them. So I started to collect them as I found them at book sales and whatnot, and when I got back into audio books at the beginning of the year, I thought I'd start "reading" some of them.

Well, either my taste has changed or Ms. Truman's writing has faltered because this one's a total dud. Had it not been an audio book, I'd have probably given up. As it was, the story improved a bit as it went along, but ended flat.

Joe Wilcox is a good, but mediocre newspaper man who happens to be in the right place at the right time for a murder, and turns it into the story of his life. His daughter's on the TV news, and he's extremely close to a cop on beat. As the story grows legs so does the body count. And a new player enters the scene--Joe's long-lost brother, an insane killer. As his life gets more and more complicated and lies flow fast, can Joe figure out things long enough to survive in this world that's threatening to pass him by?

Oh, and in case you care, there's murders, too, but they appear to be secondary to the breakdown of Wilcox, which is part of why this mystery ultimately fails. In a mystery, it's fine to have a good set of character problems, but they need to be secondary to the plot. For whatever reason, Truman (perhaps tired of writing mysteries?) goes for a character study and it doesn't work for me at all.

Part of the reason for this is the story is incredibly dull for the first half of the book. It was looking like a predictable open and shut, but layers started getting added as time goes on. The problem is, because they come into the plot so late--it's easy to tell they are the key to the crime, so it becomes a "Oh, you're telling me that because that's the killer" kind of thing. There's so much time wasted setting up Joe Wilcox and his world that there's not enough time for the reader to get the facts needed to formulate suspects. Entire chapters go into Joe's back story, telling of his parents, his brother, his courtship, his love of green beans (okay, not really but you get the idea) that the stuff in the here and now is too rushed. And the ending feels like she was given a page limit, realized she'd missed it, and had to shoe-horn about 5 too many epilogues.

I don't ask for much in a mystery, they're my "fluff" reading. I like a good story, well plotted, with characters who need to find the bad guy. This is none of those things. I'm severely disappointed. I'll try one more to see if this was a fluke, but if not, to half-price books they go. (Library, 02/08)