The Cutaway

Starred review from January 23, 2017
Washington, D.C., TV producer Virginia Knight, the narrator of TV journalist Kovac’s nail-biting first novel, takes an interest in the case of a missing woman, attorney Evelyn Carney, who was last seen running out of a Georgetown restaurant after a public fight with her husband. When Evelyn’s body is found in a cove on the Maryland side of the Potomac, Virginia applies her reporter instincts and nose for a good story to investigate the murder. Meanwhile, she’s beleaguered by Nick Mellay, a new manager at her station, who starts firing members of her staff and takes over her job, supposedly temporarily. Still, she manages to follow leads from police commander Michael Ledger, an ex-boyfriend of hers, and from Paige Linden, a law firm colleague of Evelyn’s, which point toward Ian Chase, an assistant U.S. attorney, as a person of interest. As Virginia starts uncovering information being withheld from the investigation and irregularities in witness statements, she’s left in doubt about whom to trust. Readers will want to see more of this tenacious, lovable heroine. Agent: Dan Conaway, Writers House.

January 15, 2017
A TV news producer trails a missing woman into Washington, D.C.'s dark regions.Kovac, herself a TV news producer, writes informatively and convincingly about newsroom procedures, conflicts, and subterfuges in this debut thriller. Away from the studio, however, her hand is less steady. Virginia Knightly has a memory for images, and a photo of a missing woman recalls a video cutaway she has seen. Troubled by the disappearance, Knightly unearths the video and sets out to discover what has become of the woman. Complications, some relevant, beset her. In a power play disguised as a cost-cutting move, she is demoted (this frees her to follow the missing person story) and the dreadful news director brings in a bimbo. A former lover, who may be manipulating her to cover for someone, leads the police investigation; her absent father reappears after 20 years, mortally ill. An assistant U.S. attorney is implicated, then cleared, and eventually the trail leads to a pot of dark money intended to fund shady PACs. Not a bad premise, but incomplete plotting--the dying father, for example, is never revisited; it seems he appears only to provide a mechanism to explain a lost phone--and inconsistent characterization weaken the effort. And while any exploration of power and greed in Washington offers opportunities to reflect on feminist concerns, Knightly's late assertion that she wanted to help "all the lost women who are flung into a world vaguely hostile to them" isn't convincing. Not without some strengths, but it takes more than a good newsroom to produce a good story.

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February 1, 2017
Women go missing all the time. But when promising lawyer Evelyn Carney vanishes after leaving her husband in an upscale Georgetown restaurant, Washington, D.C., television-news producer Virginia Knightly is hooked on the story. While contending with possible cutbacks at her station and a reunion with her estranged father, who's near death, Knightly sets out to pursue the Carney story. Then Carney's body is found in the Potomac River with signs of a head injury, and what was a missing-person problem becomes a murder. Knightly teams with anchorman Ben Pearce to follow the case, collecting information from Carney's husband, a marine recently returned from duty in Afghanistan who says his wife left him for another man; from her mentors; and from police commander Michael Ledger, with whom Carney had a relationship. Former D.C. newsroom manager Kovac knows her milieu and portrays it vividly in this smart, absorbing mix of media, politics, and mystery, with twists and turns to the end. An impressive debut and a good choice for fans of Hank Phillippi Ryan.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)