Mystery author L.L. Kirchner had a pretty wild first day on the job as a theater critic at Pittsburgh City Paper in 1996.
“When I first started at City Paper, I got offered this full-time job,” recalls Kirchner, “and unbeknownst to me, I had kind of taken somebody else’s job. On my first day, that guy came in and punched the editor in the face.”
They say “write what you know,” and clearly that experience influenced Kirchner’s new mystery novel, The Critic. The main character is Jessica Greer, a theater critic at a Pittsburgh alt-weekly in the late ‘90s, who is suspected of sending ricin-poisoned brownies to the widely hated theater critic who just took her job. A media firestorm follows, convicting “The Mail Murderess” in the court of public opinion and sending an ambitious FBI agent on her trail…