The Talk Show Murders

After waking up the neighborhood with The Morning Show Murders, and keeping readers up late solving The Midnight Show Murders, Al Roker returns with his most tantalizing mystery to date. Celebrity chef turned sleuth Billy Blessing finds his plate full of danger once again, as secrets from his long-buried past threaten to make a comeback.

Before Billy had his five-star restaurant in New York, before he was tapped to co-host the morning show Wake Up, America! and travel with it for a week in the Windy City—before he even assumed the name Billy Blessing—he lived a totally different life under a very different identity: as wily con man Billy Blanchard. Caught trying to run a scam on a shady Detroit businessman, Billy did time for his crimes, reinvented himself, and has successfully kept that part of his past covered up ever since. But when he and Eddie Patton, a nosy ex-cop with a long memory, are guests on a popular Chicago TV talk show, the off-camera chat turns to blackmail. And Billy may have no choice but to pay up or see the embarrassing truth from being blogcast to the world on Patton’s true crime website.

This being Chicago, secrets have a way of getting out—and getting people killed. When Patton winds up dead in his apartment only hours after trying to shake Billy down, it’s just the first in a string of killings that has America’s most beloved TV host scrambling for clues, unsure who his friends are, and desperate to clear his name before he becomes the media’s latest poster child for celebrity scandal. Throw in a budding romance with a visiting movie star and Billy Blessing may have finally gotten himself into one sticky situation even he can’t talk his way out of.

Fast-paced, funny, and bubbling over with inside scoop on the business they call show, The Talk Show Murders is Al Roker mystery fiction at its delicious, dishy best.

Al Roker is known to more than thirty million viewers for his work on NBC’s Today show, a role that has earned him ten Emmy awards. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Don’t Make Me Stop This Car!: Adventures in Fatherhood and co-author (with Dick Lochte) of the Billy Blessing novels, The Morning Show Murders and The Midnight Show Murders. An accomplished cook, Roker also has two cookbooks to his credit. Al Roker lives in Manhattan with his wife, ABC News and 20/20 correspondent Deborah Roberts, and has two daughters and a son.

Dick Lochte is the author of many popular crime novels, including the award-winning Sleeping Dog, named one of “the 100 Favorite Mysteries of the Century” by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association. His crime fiction column ran for nearly a decade in the Los Angeles Times and earned him the 2003 Ellen Nehr Award for Excellence in Mystery Reviewing. He lives in Southern California.