Laura Lippman (Author)
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Fans of bestseller Lippman's long-running series featuring Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan (Another Thing to Fall, etc.) will be pleased to find that the 17 selections in her first short story collection are as intricate and witty as her novels. Part one, Girls Gone Wild, focuses on women engaged in all manner of shady enterprises, from first-time drug buyers in The Crack Cocaine Diet to an unassuming femme fatale with a secret in Dear Penthouse Forum (A First Draft). Lest readers think Lippman can only work her magic in her Maryland hometown, she devotes a section, Other Cities, Not My Own, to stories in settings as disparate as New Orleans during Mardi Gras (Pony Girl) and Dublin, Ireland, full of jilted lovers (Honor Bar). The book's climax is Scratch a Woman, a novella written for the collection and starring Heloise, the enterprising heroine of One True Love, an earlier entry. George Pelecanos provides an appreciative introduction. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Readers buckle in with high anticipation as each of best-selling Lippman’s mysteries featuring the Baltimore private eye Tess Monaghan appears. But this major-prize-winning crime writer has also crafted stand-alone novels, including What the Dead Know (2007), and now reveals her great gift for whiplash short stories in this top-rate collection introduced by George Pelecanos. Here scams and murders are not the desperate acts of Baltimore’s downtrodden but, rather, the calculated moves of soccer moms, real-estate-savvy suburbanites, and nihilistic teens and college students. In an intoxicating mix of Poe-like horror and the pleasingly bitter irony of Dorothy Parker, Lippman tells deliciously vicious, topsy-turvy tales of women taking revenge for the endless insults and injuries of sexist, selfish men, and, for good measure, of guys who rid themselves of manipulative women. Tess is present, most enjoyably in a hilarious faux interview, while two particularly resonant tales portray Heloise, a sophisticated D.C. madam. Lippman is a class act and a potent storyteller in these elegant, furious, and blues-blasting dispatches from the endless war between the sexes. --Donna Seaman
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