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Every Secret Thing -- Laura Lippman
Recently I discovered Laura Lippman's novels, by starting with the most recent (stand alone) Every Secret Thing. Now I've read the first two novels in her series set in Baltimore with a lead character called Tess Monaghan, a former newspaper journalist who ends up as a private investigator.
I often bring up the fact that you can have excellent storytelling and good writing in the same book; plot and prose get along very well together, if you let them. The literati are fixated on character these last thirty years or so, to the extent that some of them will tell you that plot is a four letter word. So I'm always really pleased to find a new author who writes beautifully and can tell a closely plotted story at the same time. Every Secret Thing is disturbing and evocative, there are characters you can't quite like but learn to understand anyway, and an unflinching look at some issues of race relations that few authors would be brave enough to take on. This is the story (on the surface) of the abduction and murder of a ten month old baby, and the two little girls who are accused of the crime. It's both what it seems, and something entirely different.
Lippman has a way with dialogue and narrative, too. This is from Butcher's Hill, the second book in the Tess Monaghan series. The setting is a family birthday party, and the first person speaking is Tess's grandmother. The narrative voice (this is Tess's POV) is so personal and on-target that while the story is written in third person, it feels like first. That's quite something to pull off. I don't think I could do it.
"Very fancy, I'm sure. I just can't understand why things can't be the way they used to be."
Tess could. It wasn't just the loss of the house, although it had been a wonderful place for parties, that overgrown Victorian perched on a hill above the Gwynn's Falls, full of secret places, like an old dumbwaiter and the remains of a wine cellar. No, it was the loss of Poppa that had changed the nature of their family gatherings. Overworked and overextended, he had still managed to throw his love at them with both hands, like a little kid pushing up waves of water in a swimming pool. Gramma, in defiance of every known stereotype about grandmothers Jewish or otherwise, had served inedible food and begrudged them every mouthful. Unless one ate too sparingly, in which case she was offended.
I'm very much looking forward to the rest of her novels in the series, but first I'm going to read the new Francine Prose (A Changed Man) and also Gracelin O'Malley by Ann Moore.
March 13, 2005 10:38 AM
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Comments
Thanks for this review. Will have to put this on my to-read list.
Posted by: Jacqui at March 13, 2005 08:01 PM
I had mixed feelings about Every Secret Thing, and I think it was because of the many dislikable characters and the lack of Tess. That series is wonderfully addictive -- sometimes, I'm positively tickled to discover local settings that I've seen here in MD. :)
Posted by: Mariann at March 16, 2005 05:26 PM