Amber is a teenager. She is smart, does well at school, and when her boyfriend takes her to prom she couldn’t be happier. But then her boyfriend leaves to pursue the girl he really wants. Amber doesn’t feel well, goes to their hotel room alone, and gives birth to a premature baby she didn’t know she was carrying. The baby dies, and Amber is sent to juvie for an indeterminate length of time. When she gets out, she restarts her life elsewhere. Years later, in late 2019, she is drawn back to Baltimore. Her life is gone from the tabloids, but the story lingers. Nevertheless Amber stays because Joe is there, the boyfriend who abandoned her. Though Joe is married to successful plastic surgeon Meredith, he is drawn to Amber as much as she is to him. But what really happened on Prom night?
Laura Lippman is a fantastic author who pulled me in with her Tess Monaghan books: funny, bittersweet, heartfelt, and full of suspense without losing depth or humanity. And though I preferred these books to her standalones, those are excellent to. And then I read Sunburn, Lippman’s first venture into Noir, and I hated it. It felt mean-spirited and dull. It got rave reviews so that’s probably just me, but I felt disappointed. It took me years to pick up another Lippman novel.
First things first: I hate the title. It makes it sound like a dumb pageturner, and it is anything but dumb. The title makes sense – it’s exactly the sort of headline that tabloids would use for such a sordid, attention-grabbing story – but I also understand why her Dutch publisher (I read the translation) went with the much less interesting but safer Schuld (Guilt). Marketing-wise, it’s not the best move to make.
What I like about Lippman’s novels is that, for crime fiction, they’re a bit more pensive. Lippman prefers character studies over schlocky plot twists. But as with Sunburn, what I disliked here was that I didn’t really buy into the mutual attraction thing going on. Joe is a loser, the kind who secretly takes out a second mortgage on his house without consulting his wife to sink the money into a harebrained business decision. He also cheats on her, even before he runs into Amber again. The world, to Joe, feels patently unfair. If you’re into scathing rebukes of fragile male egos, this is the book for you.
For most of the novel, not much happens; people go about their lives as Lippman moves them around like pawns on a chess board. If that sounds dull, rest assured: it isn’t, because we can see it happening in real time. By the time we find out what really happened on prom night, it doesn’t really come as a surprise anymore.
The novel takes place during the first Covid wave, which is an interesting thing to read about because it both seems very recent and very long ago. Karin Slaughter’s False Witness takes place in the same setting and I didn’t like it very much at the time, because when that one came out the pandemic was still in full swing. Now, though, it almost seems like an interesting throwback. Funny how that works.
