Don’t mess with Mikki Lincoln. She may be 70, she may be a freelance editor, she may be a retired teacher, but if you push her, she will use her words to tell you just what she thinks of you. That’s what happened to Greg Onslow, CEO of Mongaup Valley Ventures, when he confronted Mikki at the gas station. He accused her of blocking his construction project, and she told him in no uncertain words just what she thought of his unfounded accusations.

Mikki doesn’t lose her temper like that often, but when she does, it’s worthy of being recorded on a cell phone and uploaded to the internet. And when Onslow ends up murdered that next day, thanks to the popular internet clip of Mikki yelling at him, she becomes one of the top suspects.

This is not Mikki’s first rodeo. She’s helped out with an investigation or two already, so while the police don’t take her anger at Onslow too seriously, she takes her involvement seriously and wants to find any information she can to clear her name. Onslow wasn’t an ethical businessman, so there were plenty of other suspects.

There’s always the wife as a possibility, or the man she left for Onslow. There are those he bilked out of investments, including Mikki’s good friend Darlene and her husband. There is the woman that Onslow left for the woman he married. And there is Mikki’s client Sunny, whose memoir about her family’s hotel in the Catskill mountains has the potential to stop his current construction project. If the land where that hotel stood somehow becomes a historic landmark, his plans for the land crumble before him, possibly bankrupting him. Which is what brought on the argument with Mikki in the first place.

As Mikki makes her list and checks it twice, she finds more family and friends on there than she’s comfortable with. But with writing and with investigating murder, the truth matters more than blood, and Mikki is relentless with her red pencil and fact-checking. But will she be able to figure out the ending to this story before the killer decides to edit her?

Kaitlyn Dunnett is back with her third installment of the Deadly Edits mystery series, A Fatal Fiction. This is another tightly written cozy about freelance editor Mikki and her small New York town of Lenape Hollow. I admit that I am especially critical of a book about an editor, and with these I am not disappointed. A Fatal Fiction includes some of the information about the Borscht Belt, the resorts in the Catskills where the comedians and singers would come to perform every year, and I especially enjoyed that part of the book. But the book as a whole is a very satisfying story, a solid mystery with characters who are starting to feel like old friends.

Egalleys for A Fatal Fiction were provided by Kensington Books through NetGalley, with many thanks.