Showing results by author "Laura Lippman"

Last year, Maddie Schwartz was a happy, even pampered housewife. This year, she’s bolted from her marriage of almost 20 years, determined to make good on her youthful ambitions to live a passionate, meaningful life. Drawing on her own secrets, she helps Baltimore police find a murdered girl - assistance that leads to a job at the city’s afternoon newspaper, the Star. Working at the newspaper offers Maddie the opportunity to make her name, and she has found just the story to do it: a missing woman whose body was discovered in the fountain of a city park lake.

They meet at a local tavern in the small town of Belleville, Delaware. Polly is set on heading west. Adam says he's also passing through. Yet she stays, and he stays - drawn to this mysterious redhead whose quiet stillness both unnerves and excites him. Over the course of a punishing summer, Polly and Adam abandon themselves to a steamy, inexorable affair. Still, each holds something back from the other - dangerous, even lethal secrets. Then someone dies. Was it an accident or part of a plan? By now Adam and Polly are so ensnared in each other's lives and lies that neither one knows how to get away.

Baltimore, 1966. When Maddie Schwartz, having recently left her husband of over 20 years, helps Baltimore police find a murdered girl, her assistance leads to a job at the city’s afternoon newspaper. Working at the newspaper offers Maddie the opportunity to make her name, and she has found just the story to do it: a missing woman whose body was discovered in the a city park lake. Cleo Sherwood was a young African American woman. No one seems to know or care why she was killed except Maddie - and the dead woman herself. 

Unemployed at 29, Tess Monaghan is willing to take any freelance job to pay the rent - including a bit of unorthodox snooping for her rowing buddy, Darryl "Rock" Paxton. In a city where someone is murdered almost every day, attorney Michael Abramowitz's death should be just another statistic. But the slain lawyer's notoriety - and his noontime trysts with Rock's fiancée - make the case front page news...and point to Rock as the likely murderer.

Thirty years ago two sisters disappeared from a shopping mall. Their bodies were never found, and those familiar with the case have always been tortured by these questions: How do you kidnap two girls? Who or what could have lured the two sisters away from a busy mall on a Saturday afternoon without leaving behind a single clue or witness? Now a clearly disoriented woman involved in a rush-hour hit-and-run claims to be the younger of the long-gone Bethany sisters.

Luisa "Lu" Brant is the newly elected - and first female - state's attorney of Howard County, Maryland, a job in which her widower father famously served. Fiercely intelligent and ambitious, she sees an opportunity to make her name by trying a mentally disturbed drifter accused of beating a woman to death in her home. It's not the kind of case that makes headlines, but peaceful Howard County doesn't see many homicides.

Dead is dead. Missing is gone. When Felix Brewer meets nineteen-year-old Bernadette "Bambi" Gottschalk at a Valentine's Day dance in 1959, he charms her with wild promises, some of which he actually keeps. Thanks to his lucrative - if not all legal - businesses, she and their three little girls live in luxury. But on the Fourth of July in 1976, Bambi's comfortable world implodes when Felix, facing prison, vanishes. Though Bambi has no idea where her husband - or his money - might be, she suspects one woman does: his devoted young mistress, Julie.

In the summer of 1985, when she was fifteen, Eliza was kidnapped by Walter and held hostage for almost six weeks. He had killed at least one girl and Eliza always suspected he had other victims as well. Now on death row in Virginia for the rape and murder of his final victim, Walter seems to be making a heartfelt act of contrition as his execution nears. Though Eliza wants nothing to do with him, she's never forgotten that Walter was most unpredictable when ignored.

In the third trimester of her pregnancy, Baltimore private investigator Tess Monaghan is under doctor's orders to remain immobile. Bored and restless, reduced to watching the world go by outside her window, she takes small comfort in the mundane events she observes... like the young woman in a green raincoat who walks her dog at the same time every day. Then one day the dog is running free and its owner is nowhere to be seen.

Laura Lippman won the Nero Wolfe Award for this powerful mystery. Former journalist turned P.I. Tess Monaghan thought she knew Baltimore like the back of her hand - but what she doesn't know just might kill her in this grim yet irresistible novel.

Heloise considers it a blessing to be a person who seldom attracts attention. In her suburb, she's just a mom, the young widow with the forgettable job, who somehow never misses a soccer game. In the state capital, she's the redheaded lobbyist with a good cause and a mediocre track record. But in discreet hotel rooms throughout the area, she's the woman of your dreams - if you can afford the hourly fee. For more than a decade, Heloise believed she was safe, managing to keep up this rigidly compartmentalized life. But her secret life is under siege. One county over, another so-called suburban madam has been found dead in her car, an apparent suicide.

Kicked out of a birthday party, 11-year-olds Alice and Ronnie walk home and encounter a baby left in a carriage. Their earnest desire to do a good deed ends tragically, however, and seven years later they are released from "kid prison" to start their lives anew.

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.

PI Tess Monaghan knows and loves every inch of her native Baltimore. It's a quirky city where baseball reigns, but lately homicide seems to be the second most popular sport. Business tycoon Wink Wynkowski is trying to change all that by bringing pro basketball to town--until a devastating expose appears in the Baltimore Beacon Light. The newspaper's editors thought they'd killed the piece. Instead, the piece killed Wink, who's found dead in his garage. Tess is hired to find the unknown hacker who planted the lethal story.

Lippman's brilliant and disturbing tale of three inseparable high school girlfriends in an affluent Baltimore suburb who share dark secrets literally until death, To the Power of Three is this "writing powerhouse" ( USA Today), who has "exploded the boundaries of the mystery genre to become one of the most significant social realists of our time" (Madison Smartt Bell) operating at the very top of her game.

New York Times best-selling author Laura Lippman has been hailed as one of the best crime fiction writers in America today, winning virtually every major award in the genre. This audio contains the individual short story “Hardly Knew Her”, from the collection Hardly Knew Her. 

Seven original baseball short stories in the mystery and murder genres, written by an all star lineup of writers, each of whom understand the game's lore and tactical nuances as well as its deep roots in American life. Compiled by Otto Penzler, the proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City and regarded as the world's foremost authority on crime, mystery and suspense fiction.

A Sunday newspaper profile of Tess Monaghan, Baltimore's favorite private detective.

First as a reporter and then as a PI, Tess Monaghan has learned how to survive and thrive on the streets of Baltimore. But a new case will force her to confront her own past, and a man she loved and lost. It starts when she gets a newspaper photograph of her old boyfriend with a tantalizing shard of headline attached: In Big Trouble. The answers lie far from Baltimore, deep in a world of good-time music, old-fashioned ambition, and rich people's games. For Tess must find out what happened to a man she thought she knew, to a woman who may have changed him forever, and to the victims of a killer who dances to a different - and deadly - drummer.

When private investigator Tess Monaghan literally runs into the crew of the fledgling TV series Mann of Steel while sculling, she expects sharp words and evil looks, not an assignment. But the company has been plagued by a series of disturbing incidents since its arrival on location in Baltimore: bad press, union threats, and small, costly on-set "accidents" that have wreaked havoc with its shooting schedule.