Bury the Lede by Gaby Dunn and Claire Roe

[spindizzy]

Twenty-one-year-old Madison T. Jackson is already the star of the Emerson College student newspaper when she nabs a coveted night internship at Boston’s premiere newspaper, The Boston Lede. The job’s simple: do whatever the senior reporters tell you to do, from fetching coffee to getting a quote from a grieving parent. It’s grueling work, so when the murder of a prominent Boston businessman comes up on the police scanner, Madison races to the scene of the grisly crime. There, Madison meets the woman who will change her life forever: prominent socialite Dahlia Kennedy, who is covered in gore and being arrested for the murder of her family. The newspapers put everyone they can in front of her with no results until, with nothing to lose, Madison gets a chance – and unexpectedly barrels headfirst into danger she never anticipated.

Gaby Dunn's Bury the Lede revolves around Madison, an intern with plans to become a reporter, whose big break comes when a murderer decides that Madison's the only person that she's going to give information to.

I have very mixed feelings about this. The mystery at the core of Bury the Lede is interesting – what happened to Dahlia Kennedy's son, and why did she murder her husband – and the way that it unfurls into more crimes and deeper mysteries with every hint she drops is very cool! I think I just wasn't in the mood for Madison, who is so focused on her ideas of being a reporter and doing the right thing that she steps on, betrays, or ruins everyone she loves. As a character, I love her; she's a messy queer Asian-American woman who has very specific ideas of what she wants to do with her life! But I have a lot of sympathy for the people around her, so the fact that she unrelentingly backstabs everyone who shows her a spec of kindness left me kinda rooting for her not to succeed. Like, "Madison roofies a woman to get more information out of her and this is never dealt with in any way" levels of yikes, okay. So on the one hand, its an opportunity to read about a queer WOC who gets to have casual sex and be a horrible person, which is great! But on the other hand, she screws over literally every character I cared about.

The art is pretty solid, although I did have some trouble following scenes and leaps of logic when I was reading it just because there was so much going on. But if you want a story about a young woman seeing how far she's willing to go for the sake of a story, this is a solid choice!

[Caution warning: murder, abuse, drugging] [This review is based on an ARC from Netgalley]