A small-town obituary writer investigates a double homicide.
Prospect Park Books, $16
Jill Orr, a longtime resident of Columbia, Missouri, once vacationed for a summer in Williamsburg and fell in love with Virginia. While there, she began writing her first novel, The Good Byline, a cozy mystery featuring a millennial protagonist named Riley Ellison who works as an obituary writer. Enamored as she was with the beautiful landscape and the Southern charm and manners shown by everyone she met, she decided to set the novel in Virginia, in an imaginary town called Tuttle Corner, located halfway between Williamsburg and Richmond.
“As a fiction writer,” Orr says, “I really don’t want to be constrained by things like facts and geography—anything that I could get wrong and get angry emails about. So I decided to just make up a town. That way I could be in charge of it and no one would know if I made a mistake.”
Her debut novel was a success and led to follow-up titles in the Ellison mystery series: The Bad Break in 2018 and, recently, The Ugly Truth. Each novel stands alone, but past readers will enjoy picking up on Ellison’s escapades and seeing characters from her turbulent love life make appearances.
Events in The Ugly Truth swirl around Tuttle Corner’s most popular eatery, Rosalee’s Tavern. The police apprehend a thug named Justin Balzichek after he tosses a sledgehammer through the tavern’s front window. He tells them that Greer Montbatten, the wife of a notorious Washington, D.C., lobbyist, hired him to do it because the tavern’s owner, Rosalee Belanger, is having an affair with her husband. Shortly thereafter, Montbatten and Balzichek are both found murdered in separate incidents. The police’s prime suspect is the victim of the vandalism, Belanger, who has vanished. Ellison steps in to investigate because Belanger is a friend—and, she can’t imagine life without Belanger’s buttered croissants.
Hindering her efforts are coworkers with their own agendas and a sheriff who refuses to divulge anything outside of a press release. As Ellison’s investigation bumbles along, sometimes sending her after red herrings and other times putting her in the crosshairs of the true murderer, she also has personal matters to contend with, including an ex-boyfriend who has recently moved back to town and her responsibilities at the Tuttle Times. As Orr writes, “I needed to follow up with the den mother of local Cub Scout Pack 787 about their upcoming food drive, check in on the lineup for the Thanksgiving Day parade, and I wanted a quote from Mayor Lancett on the most recent stunt from local legend ‘Batty Betty’ Grimes, who had decided last Monday to paint herself purple and sit at the intersection of Main and Park holding a sign that read ‘Shaylene Lancett Colluded with Russia to Get Elected.’”
Among the many quirks in Tuttle Corner is Ellison’s search for love. Being a twenty-something, she enlists the online assistance of Regina H., a “personal romance concierge” who peppers Ellison with inspirational aphorisms and tasks her with self-care routines that backfire with hilarious results. One “sensory awareness” exercise leaves Ellison with first-degree burns from hot wax. “I just tried to think of what the most ridiculous thing about [an online dating advisor] could be, and then I ran with that,” says Orr. She succeeded; Regina’s spectacularly poor advice and inept hashtags serve as comic relief amidst the anxieties of Ellison’s hunt for a killer.
The humorous slant is not what Orr had intended when she first dreamed up her protagonist. “When I first had the idea for a character who was obsessed with obituaries,” she says, “my first thought was that she’s going to be kind of dark and brooding, maybe have a goth kind of edge to her. As I started doing research on actual people obsessed with obituaries, I discovered that those people are really optimistic and really hopeful. They read obituaries as a way to distill life’s purpose and meaning. So Riley became a lot more optimistic and hopeful. And I am kind of an optimist myself. So it’s probably easier for me to write that.”
The fortunate result is that Orr’s books are fast and fun reads that leave you wondering what will happen next in Ellison’s life. Luckily, you won’t have long to wait as her fourth book, The Full Scoop, will be released June 9, 2020.
This article originally appeared in our October 2019 issue.
