Too old for this

When walker-wielding septuagenarian Lottie Jones pulls up her compression socks and answers her door one day, she gets an awful surprise. Ambitious documentary filmmaker Plum Dixon wants to feature her in an online series telling comeback stories of people falsely accused of crimes. Well, Lottie simply can't allow that. She has changed her name, relocated, and made a new life for herself revolving around her church, and even a hint of past criminal involvement could ruin everything for her. The horrible truth is that although she was exonerated of several murders 40 years ago, she actually did commit them. And her house was paid for by the money she won suing the city of Spokane over her "ordeal." Lottie makes a hasty but seamless dispatch of the unfortunate Plum, but when people come looking for the young woman, the long-retired serial killer finds she must go back to work full-time and try not to kill her somewhat enfeebled self in the process. This is Downing at her best. Delightfully macabre and so artful that the reader might well root for Lottie, even when she is psychotic to the max. The perfect recommendation for someone looking for something different and extremely entertaining.

Seventy-five-year-old Lottie Jones has spent the last 40 years trying to live an unremarkable life. She spends her time going to bingo at church and talking with her friends. Then, independent documentary filmmaker Plum Dixon unexpectedly visits her, requesting an interview for a web series about how Lottie was "wrongfully accused" of being a serial killer under her former name in the 1980s. Although Lottie declines, Plum becomes insistent--so insistent that Lottie has no choice but to kill her. The one-time murder snowballs into a series of events that could upend Lottie's retirement. Narrator Wiley mischievously voices Lottie as a woman who is tired of getting into sticky situations but will do anything to get out of them. She changes Lottie's voice to that of a forgetful senior citizen any time she interacts with people investigating Plum's disappearance. Her use of a shrill twang as Plum's mother, Norma, perfectly captures that character's unpredictability. VERDICT Wiley's performance vividly energizes Downing's (A Twisted Love Story) grim comedy. Lottie is a cunning antihero that listeners will root for as she gets away with murder.--Anjelica Rufus