by DarrylWimberley
Brenda Barrington’s is the voice anchoring A Star In Her Crown, a Peabody nominee who has lost her prestigious and well-paying job at CNN after blowing coverage of the 2016 presidential race. Realizing that she cannot survive on the blogosphere, Brenda has reluctantly retreated to her rural and very conservative hometown in Florida’s Big Bend to take over the local FM radio station where she is quickly reminded that a big-city correspondent’s opinions cannot compete with football, family reunions, or the Future Farmers of America. Brenda does manage to make some impact. When we find her in a sweltering October, Brenda’s low-powered reporting has already put a local scion behind bars for peddling opioids, but come the dog days of summer nothing new looms on the horizon until a long-absent if favorite son returns to Florida’s Second Congressional District to run as a Democrat against his Republican uncle for a seat in the US House of Representatives. PD Putnal is tied to Brenda with a strong and unusual bond; the Homecoming King and star quarterback dated Brenda’s elder sister who died while still a teenager. Despite that tragic connection, Brenda is determined to stay neutral during the Congressional race. The campaign gets nasty right away as Bull Putnal fuels rumors that his nephew is not only liberal but gay, that tactic taking a deadly turn when PD’s fingerprints are found near the burned-out shell of the houseboat where his accuser has been murdered. Brenda cannot ignore the story that snowballs, a vicious fight that puts her back in front of the cameras—but also in a killer’s sights.
