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Summary
Summary
The award-winning New York Times bestselling author of After I'm Gone, The Most Dangerous Thing, I'd Know You Anywhere, and What the Dead Know brings back private detective Tess Monaghan, introduced in the classic Baltimore Blues, in an absorbing mystery that plunges the new parent into a disturbing case involving murder and a manipulative mother.
On a searing August day, Melisandre Harris Dawes committed the unthinkable: she left her two-month-old daughter locked in a car while she sat nearby on the shores of the Patapsco River. Melisandre was found not guilty by reason of criminal insanity, although there was much skepticism about her mental state. Freed, she left the country, her husband and her two surviving children, determined to start over.
But now Melisandre has returned Baltimore to meet with her estranged teenage daughters and wants to film the reunion for a documentary. The problem is, she relinquished custody and her ex, now remarried, isn't sure he approves.
Now that's she's a mother herself--short on time, patience--Tess Monaghan wants nothing to do with a woman crazy enough to have killed her own child. But her mentor and close friend Tyner Gray, Melisandre's lawyer, has asked Tess and her new partner, retired Baltimore P.D. homicide detective Sandy Sanchez, to assess Melisandre's security needs.
As a former reporter and private investigator, Tess tries to understand why other people break the rules and the law. Yet the imperious Melisandre is something far different from anyone she's encountered. A decade ago, a judge ruled that Melisandre was beyond rational thought. But was she? Tess tries to ignore the discomfort she feels around the confident, manipulative Melisandre. But that gets tricky after Melisandre becomes a prime suspect in a murder.
Yet as her suspicions deepen, Tess realizes that just as she's been scrutinizing Melisandre, a judgmental stalker has been watching her every move as well. . . .
Author Notes
Laura Lippman grew up in Baltimore and returned to her home town in 1989 to work as a journalist. After writing seven books while still a full-time reporter, she left the Baltimore Sun to focus on fiction.
Laura is the author of What the Dead Know, 2016 New York Times Bestseller, Another Thing to Fall, After I'm Gone, and Wilde Lake. She also writes the Tess Monaghan series. She has won numerous awards for her work including the Edgar, Quill, Anthony, Nero Wolfe, Agatha, Gumshoe, Barry, and Macavity.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
New York Review of Books Review
Tess's new case presents a huge challenge for this first-time parent. Years ago, a brilliant, successful and thoroughly unlikable lawyer named Melisandre Harris Dawes left her baby daughter in a parked car and watched her die. After two high-profile trials in which she was acquitted on the grounds of postpartum psychosis, Melisandre abandoned her two older daughters and fled the country. Now she's back, with a documentary filmmaker on the payroll, to reconcile with her daughters and make a movie of the event. Against her better judgment, Tess agrees to do a friend a favor and provide protection for this public pariah. But something tells her it's not going to be an easy job. Lippman knows her stuff and introduces some clever plot twists and turns (not to mention a murder). But her character studies, largely drawn from the way people feel about having children, are exceptional. Melisandre may not be anyone's idea of a model mother, but does that make her a murderer? And who's to say what makes a good parent? After all, Tess's friend and partner, Sandy Sanchez, responded to single parenthood by institutionalizing his profoundly disturbed son. ("The best thing about Mary's death was that Sandy could stop pretending to care about him.") Even Tess, besotted with love for her little hellion, has to acknowledge that having children isn't all it's cracked up to be. "No one tells you that it's, well, kind of boring," she admits. "Being a mom." At least until the next tantrum. THE TWO KEY players in Lou Berney's superb regional mystery, THE LONG AND FARAWAY GONE (Morrow/HarperCollins, paper, $14.99), suffer from separate but equally crushing cases of survivor guilt. Wyatt Rivers is a low-rent Las Vegas P.I. who does background checks on prospective casino hires. But back in the summer of 1986, when he was 15 years old and working at a movie theater in Oklahoma City, he was the only person left alive when three masked gunmen robbed the theater, killing the manager and the other five teenagers on staff. At the end of that long-ago summer, 17-year-old Genevieve Rosales, who "looked like a girl who was looking for trouble," vanished from the Oklahoma State Fair, leaving her 12-year-old sister, Julianna, traumatized for life. Julianna grew up to be a nurse, but she never left Oklahoma City, and she never stopped trying to solve the mystery of her sister's disappearance. Wyatt thought he'd suppressed the memory of his own nightmare, but when a job he can't refuse takes him back home, he finds himself struggling with the question that still gnaws at him: "Why me?" Berney tells both their stories with supreme sensitivity, exploring "the landscape of memory" that keeps shifting beneath our feet, opening up the graves of all those ghosts we thought we'd buried. "SHE PICKS AN invisible bug off her face." On that intriguing note Sandra Block begins her offbeat first novel, LITTLE BLACK LIES (Grand Central, paper, $15), a psychological suspense story smartly narrated by Dr. Zoe Goldman, a young psychiatrist doing her residency at a Buffalo hospital. Watching her mother slip into dementia has awakened Zoe's curiosity about her birth mother, who died in a house fire when Zoe was only 4. That mother fixation also draws her to a new patient, a certifiable psycho who murdered her own mother at the age of 14 and has spent more than 20 years in state mental wards. It's too bad the plot is so schematic, because the hospital scenes play well and Zoe has a quick wit that emerges in wickedly unexpected ways. HIGH, DRY and severely beautiful - that's the terrain Ben Jones sees from the cab of his 28-foot tractor-trailer rig in THE NEVER-OPEN DESERT DINER (Caravel, $25), a wondrously strange first novel by James Anderson. Ben's route is a 100-mile stretch of State Road 117 in a desolate section of Utah's high desert. His customers are isolated cattle ranchers and ornery "desert rats" who depend on him for their bales of barbed wire and cases of chili. The best part of his run is always a stop at Walt Butterfield's pristinely preserved but permanently closed vintage diner in the middle of nowhere. There's a sad story behind that, but there are a lot of sad stories on Ben's route (including his own), and Anderson tells them in a voice that's ... well, high, dry and severely beautiful. Ben's dull life takes a dangerous turn when he happens on the model home for an unbuilt housing development and discovers an attractive woman inside, playing a cello with no strings. There's a sad story behind that too, so let's just say that Anderson is one fine storyteller.
Library Journal Review
Tess and boyfriend Crow are maintaining their romance while balancing jobs and family and coping with their precocious three-year-old daughter, Carla Scout. With her PI firm short on clients, Tess agrees to check security arrangements for -Melisandre Dawes, a child killer found not guilty by reason of insanity, who is filming a biopic of her life, her trial, and her attempt to reestablish relations with her ex-husband and her two teenage daughters. A couple of subplots unrelated to the murder of the ex-husband further muddle the main plot, making the overall effort seem strained. An excellent reading by Jan Maxwell saves the audio. Characters developed earlier in the series seem shallow in this tale, and it's difficult to empathize with several new ones. VERDICT Despite this books' problems, the author's fans will want to hear it; recommended for adult mystery fiction collections. ["Strongly recommended for fans of Lippman's previous books, as well as readers who enjoy stories about female private investigators": LJ 1/15 starred review of the Morrow hc.]-Cliff Glaviano, formerly with Bowling Green State Univ. Libs., OH © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
