It’s been awhile since I’ve re-read this book and, when I started it last night, it seemed new to me. I knew I had read it before, at least two or three times but, at first, it just didn’t seem familiar. Awesome! It’s like having a whole new book again, a mystery where I don’t know whodunnit and I can be surprised all over again. I settled back to read and stayed up all night to finish the book. Even though, when I got to a certain scene, one of the characters said something and I suddenly remembered who the murderer was. I couldn’t exactly remember why they had done it, I didn’t remember the details. There was just a voice in my head that announced, so-and-so did it.

An early scene deftly sets the scene and introduces the characters. A company costume party for New Year’s Eve where the employees at 24-hour news mega-channel, ANN, dress up as their favorite news stories. Robin Hudson, main character and narrator, dresses up as Ginny Foat, a founding member of NOW whose estranged husband falsely accused her of murdering a rich Argentinian with a tire iron; the accusation was her ex’s way of getting back at her for dumping him. Robin’s own soon to be ex- and his new fiancée come as Oliver North and Fawn Hall. Her Neanderthal boss dresses up as Richard Nixon. Her future love interest, as New Coke. One of her other colleagues, who Robin comes to suspect later in the book, as Tipper Gore; another – the one who is having the glamourous reporting career that Robin wanted for herself – as 1950’s Lucille Ball. And a few of the on-air personalities come as themselves because they are the only news they care about. Somewhere amongst the AIDs, SCUD Missals, and Woody Allens at the party is the blackmailer that called and told Robin to meet him here if she didn’t want her secrets revealed.

It’s been a bad year for Robin. After publicly rejecting the advances of the vain youth-seeking host of ANN’s version of The Larry King Show, Robin’s guardian angel reassigned her to the political beat in Washington, where she promptly embarrassed the network by, when called upon in a White House Press Corps scrum, inadvertently loudly belching directly into the microphone instead of asking a question. Perhaps Robin could have lived that down if only she hadn’t given into curiosity and asked the only survivor of a plane crash, a woman who had been forced to survive by eating her best friend, what it had tasted like.

So Robin was reassigned to news Siberia: Special Reports, run by the aforementioned sexist boss, who picks his stories based purely on what will sell to the sponsors and sensationalizes even the impact of a dishonest sperm bank that was supposed to impregnate a lily white wife with her husband’s preciously-banked pre-surgery sperm but, when she gives birth to a baby, it clearly has some other man’s DNA, a man who was not white, her racist husband points out in words that make her flinch and clutch her baby protectively. The wife cannot leave the jerk who hates her baby; she barely speaks English, they’ve just arrived from Eastern Europe and she has no idea how to navigate this strange new world as a single mother. And Robin’s boss exploits her story, sensationalizes it to make it about a man whose line has tragically ended, thanks to the dishonest sperm bank.

In the midst of her professional flameout, Robin also discovered that her local news-anchor husband has been having an affair with one of her ANN colleagues, a pert blonde with a honeyed drawl, and demanded a divorce. He is determined to be mature about it and remain friends; she is determined to be a complete bitch to them until they admit that having the affair was wrong, wrong, wrong, something they have yet to admit because, they say, they are in love. Gak.

Throw in an elderly downstairs neighbor who wears her hearing aid volume up too high and is certain that Robin is having transsexual orgies in her apartment at night, and assaults Robin with her cane and Chihuahua every time they run into each other at the elevator or on the street; and Robin’s rescued street cat, who is used to eating out of restaurant dumpsters and refuses to eat canned food unless it’s sautéed with Bok Choy and oyster sauce.

Oh, and the dead blackmailer, his face smashed in with Robin’s tire iron, which she put down so she could dance with New Coke. Who killed the blackmailer? Who else was at ANN was he blackmailing? He was a private detective and it looks like the blackmailing was a little side-hustle on a legit investigation that someone hired him to carry out on people at ANN – who hired him and why? And who stole the keys to Robin’s apartment and clearly used them to go there and do… something… she isn’t sure what but she’s sure someone was there because her apartment is cleaner than it was when she left home that morning. (Okay! Housework has been suffering lately. She’s been busy!)

This book is a delightful romp through early 90’s NYC, the business and interpersonal machinations of a large cable-news network, who is just trying to stave off a hostile takeover and maintain viewership, if only their employees would be up-front with the PR team charged with protecting the company from the damaging secrets that everyone there seems to have in their past. The characters are creepily hilarious. Robin could have come out of an of the “final-girl” books that came out a few years ago – she decorates her windowsill ledges with pots of poison ivy, stocks her purse a bottle of perfume spiked with capsaicin instead of mace, and carries an Epilady to fend off attackers in the skeevy neighborhood in which she lives, a neighborhood that feels familiar.

I’m going to sign off with the the last paragraph of the book, a passage that perfectly captures the chaotic hilarity that is this book:

“Even Louise Bryant [her cat, who ended up in the news after saving Robin’s life] has had offers. Get this. Some agent saw my cat on the news, and wants to sign her to an endorsement contract. My cat gets an agent before I do. My cat could make more this year than me. It’s a weird world.”