In “Hush Hush,” the 12th of Laura Lippman’s bestselling Tess Monaghan mysteries, Tess is no longer the star of her own series. That honor now belongs to her daughter: a 3-year-old scene-stealer-in-pigtails named Carla Scout. Tess was pregnant with this usurper-in-utero in her last outing; now she’s a working mom, frantically trying to wedge her detecting gigs into the relentless daily round of mealtimes, meltdowns, playtimes and bedtime. These days, when Tess says she’s “packing,” she’s more likely to be referring to goldfish and Gummi bears than to a pistol.
‘Wilde Lake,’ one of Laura Lippman’s finest novels, feels personal
By Patrick Anderson
April 28, 2016
Laura Lippman’s “Wilde Lake” is one of her best novels and feels like one of her most personal. The story takes us deep into the life of Luisa (Lu) Brant, seen both as a child and as the state’s attorney of Howard County, Maryland. The book is unusual in that Lippman spends more time relating Lu’s childhood and family life than she does the novel’s nominal plot, which concerns a murder case that Lu prosecutes. But Lippman’s portrayal of Lu’s girlhood and family is so exceptional, readers won’t miss the legal drama. You rarely find characterizations as sensitive as these in genre fiction or, indeed, any fiction.
Novelists have to be open to being told that they have failed and, in the worst-case scenario, caused real pain
By Laura Lippman June 21, 2019
Late last year, I was asked to participate in a reading in Baltimore, my hometown and the place where most of my 20-plus novels have been set. Although my next book was still months away from publication, I read from the first chapter, curious to see how an audience would respond to a twist at the end. People gasped gratifyingly when it turned out that the speaker was actually a ghost.
Laura Lippman’s love letter to Baltimore and its people
Jan Michalski
July 19, 2019
Everyone knows the dangers of being in the news business these days, but Laura Lippman’s new novel “Lady in the Lake” is a powerful reminder that the search for the truth has always been a precarious and underappreciated one. In an eerie and heartbreaking coincidence, the day after Lippman turned in the final draft of her book, five members of the staff of the Capital Gazette — Rob Hiaasen, Gerald Fischman, John McNamara, Rebecca Smith and Wendi Winters — were killed by a gunman in the paper’s Annapolis newsroom. Lippman was friends with Hiaasen, and in the acknowledgments of the book, she dedicates what she calls her “weird love letter to Baltimore newspapers of the ’60s” to them. Her book is that and more.
Adrian McKinty’s explosively brilliant The Chain opens as a 13-year-old girl, Kylie, is kidnapped from a bus stop as she checks the likes on her Instagram feed. A policeman is shot dead by the kidnappers a couple of pages later, but it’s quickly clear this is not your typical kidnapping crime. Then Kylie’s mum, Rachel, gets a call, and it all starts to become horribly, terrifyingly clear: Kylie’s kidnapping is just the latest in a chain that stretches back years. If Rachel kidnaps another child and pays a ransom, and her victim’s parents then abduct another child, Kylie will be released. If she doesn’t, Kylie will be killed. “It’s that simple,” she’s told. “That’s how The Chain works and goes on for ever.” This is genuinely unputdownable, as Rachel follows “the thread into the heart of the labyrinth”. McKinty’s brilliance lies in exploring just how far a parent will go to rescue their child. These are people committing dreadful crimes – crimes they are horrified by – but they carry them out nonetheless. Terribly plausible.
Faber, £12.99, pp352“Maddie Schwartz, pushing 40, has nothing to look forward to,” observes one of the characters in Laura Lippman’s Lady in the Lake. Maddie thinks otherwise, leaving her husband and son to work on the local Baltimore newspaper. She is desperate for a byline – “ambition comes off this one like heat”, says one man – but this is 1966. She lacks experience and isn’t taken seriously. Maddie is “the kind of woman who laughs at men’s jokes even when they’re not funny”. But when she finds out that the body of a black woman, Cleo Sherwood, has been discovered in a fountain, and that no one else seems to care, she starts to investigate, using every tool at her disposal to pick away at the dangerous secrets and closed ranks that surround this story. Lippman is such a skilful writer, her narrative flitting between perspectives to bring 1960s Baltimore, a world of racial tensions and sexual inequality, to vivid life.
The body count is ridiculously high within the first few pages of Alex Marwood’s The Poison Garden, as police officers discover a mass suicide at a survivalist, doomsday cult in the Welsh mountains. Only a few members of the cult have survived, among them 22-year-old Romy, who is pregnant and trying to navigate the confusing realities of our world, and her two younger siblings, “orphans of a storm created by other people’s wicked choices”. Moving between timelines, Marwood slowly elucidates the world Romy grew up in, where the children are taught about the dangers of “yew trees and foxgloves and deadly nightshade… adders and hemlock and unwashed wounds” as soon as they can talk, where strange mating rituals and death from tetanus are commonplace. In the present day, Romy learns more about who her mother was and what she ran away from to join the cult, and gradually the reasons for all this death become clearer.
Jo Nesbo says that he’s “been brutal to Harry before but never this brutal”. He’s not kidding: in the latest Harry Hole novel, the 12th in the series, the Norwegian detective is wallowing in epic amounts of Scandi noir. Back on the booze and facing the worst loss of his life, Harry is in a very dark place. As he sets out to solve a killing – and to face off against an old enemy, Svein Finne, who is out of prison and wreaking havoc – he knocks back industrial amounts of alcohol to numb the pain, has dazzling moments of intuition and charms most of the women whose paths he crosses, despite reeking of stale booze. The twists play out brilliantly; the translation by Neil Smith is flawless. This is the king of Norwegian crime on top form. Fans might only ask he give his protagonist a little less of a brutal ride next time round.
From Nancy Mitford’s ‘the Bolter’ – so named for her serial monogamy – to the mother of Kramer vs Kramer, here are the best mums on the run Laura Lippman Wed 21 March 2018
Do all mothers fantasise about fleeing their families, if only for a weekend? Or do we simply crave the vicarious thrill of reading about something we know we’ll never do? I’ve long been obsessed with runaway mother stories, relatively rare in fiction. Gone Girl? Sure. Gone Mommy? Not so much. A woman who leaves her family is seen as starkly unnatural. Maybe that’s why so many of my favourite runaway novels play the subject for laughs, or relegate it to a subplot.
Still, I have long wanted to play with this trope and use it for a straight-up crime novel, one as dark as I could imagine. What kind of woman leaves her family? That’s the question that animated my new book Sunburn, but it’s also central to these 10 very different novels.
1. Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler
This wry, big-hearted novel is quintessential book club fodder, meant to be dissected with other women, preferably over wine and snacks. Delia Grinstead, still somewhat unformed at the age of 40, bolts from her family on a beach vacation, only to find a new life caring for the child of another runaway mother. This is Tyler at her best, which is as good as it gets.
2. Kinflicks by Lisa Alther
This hilarious 1976 debut centres on one woman’s flirtations with many personae, almost all dictated by her partner and/or mentor of the moment. Ginny Hull Babcock frames her life as a Hegelian odyssey of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, but she finds being the mother of a toddler particularly challenging. Technically, Ginny’s husband throws her out, but she doesn’t return to fetch her daughter.
3. The Women’s Room by Marilyn French
In French’s seminal novel about second-wave feminists at Harvard, the main character, Mira, leaves her two sons with her ex-husband when she decides to attend graduate school. But their relationship actually improves when she pursues her own dreams. By the end, Mira is bitter and disappointed, but she has solid relationships with both her sons.
Meryl Streep, Dustin Hoffman and Justin Henry in the 1979 film adaptation of Avery Corman’s novel Kramer vs Kramer. Photograph: Tom Wargacki
This 1977 novel has aged better than I expected. Corman does his best to find empathy for Joanna Kramer, the mother who flees and then returns to demand full custody of the son she abandoned. After an acrimonious trial, the judge grants her wish, and then she decides she doesn’t want her son after all – a maddeningly convenient “happy” ending for her ex-husband. Is it a happy ending for the child, though? Corman seems to think so.
It’s hard to write a hilarious Gone Mommy book, but Semple pulled it off in this sly 2012 novel. Semple uses a wide sampling of written formats – report cards, correspondence, school memos, police reports – to craft this ultimately empathic portrait of an overwhelmed woman weighed down by her past.
6. Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
For years, I thought this classic “sensation novel” was the invention of an American children’s writer, Maud Hart Lovelace, who used it as an example of a salacious “dime store” novel. It’s not only a real novel, it’s based on a real woman: Constance Kent. Decried by some in its time, Lady Audley’s Secret is now taught in universities as a feminist classic. Elaine Showalter, writing in the London Review of Books, noted: “While [Braddon] condemns Lady Audley’s crimes, Braddon also hints … that women are frustrated and destructive because they are confined to passive domestic lives.”
7. Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg
June Reid has holed up in a seaside motel thousands of miles from her home, determined not to tell her story. After losing her entire family and her boyfriend in a tragic accident, June has lost any sense of herself. It turns out that someone can be a runaway mother even when she no longer has a family to escape. This novel slowly and gracefully answers the question in its title.
This novel follows its titular characters in the year after the death of the family patriarch. Lydia Mansfield, the younger, usually dutiful daughter, decides to leave her marriage and only takes one of her two sons with her. She believes her decision is merely pragmatic – her older son prefers living in the family house, while the younger one needs more supervision – and is shocked to discover that the school psychologist sees her as a selfish, indifferent mother. It’s a small plot point in a sprawling, satisfying book about three women recalibrating their identities.
When I taught creative writing in college and asked students what they read for pleasure, Voigt’s name came up time and again. Homecoming is the first book in the so-called Tillerman cycle and it begins with four siblings being abandoned in a shopping mall parking lot. It falls to the eldest, 13-year-old Dicey, to keep the family intact. The saga spans seven books; the mother’s mysterious disappearance is resolved in the second, when it’s revealed she’s a catatonic patient in a psychiatric hospital.
FacebookTwitterPinterest‘The Bolter’ … played by Frances Barber in a BBC adaptation. Photograph: Gary Moyes/BBC1
With their mother known as “the Bolter” due to being a serial monogamist, how will her daughters learn to make good choices in their own relationships? That’s an inevitable question in this 1945 comic novel, about which Zoë Heller wrote: “But beneath the brittle surface of Mitford’s wit there is something infinitely more melancholy at work – something that is apt to snag you and pull you into its dark undertow when you are least expecting it.” Heller theorises that Pursuit is a love-it-or-hate-it book – making it a lot like runaway mothers, whom we either sympathise with or revile.