I’ve written before about my reading journey with Laura Lippman. I loved the Tess Monaghan series for its local color, less so for Tess.* Lippman had better books in her and as she branched out to standalone works, her talent shone. She does excellent character-based crime tales with enough local flavor to fill in blanks but not so much that you suffocate on it.
This is one of her early stand-alone works. I’m not sure why I’ve never read it but I’m glad I did now. She was still finding her footing in this work; there are a lot of places that could have been edited. And some characters are given the short shrift, while others get more screen time than need be. She doesn’t slow the burn as much as occasionally light it.
But when it comes together, it really works in a devastating way. I’ve had issues with Lippman’s obfuscation; and it’s not great here but it made the ending all the more painful. It was one where I was certain the direction in which it would go and was completely wrong. While it’s true that we all bring our biased, politicized perspective to the art we consume, this one will really hit you depending who you are and how you experience it.
*Reading some Spenser books makes it make sense how the modern day PI involved. I used to blame Chandler but as Robert Parker is hailed as reviving the genre, I’m blaming him for almost every literary PI written in the 80s and 90s being an insufferable smart aleck.
