It should not be so hard to write both poetry and fiction. Both arts, after all, make use of the same materials, words and punctuation. Poems...
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What appears at first to be a well-written mystery of the police procedural variety turns out to be a truly fascinating character study. Laura Lippman achieves this feat by the use of creative flashbacks and pain-staking research that illuminate not just the day in 1975 when two teenage girls disappeared from a suburban Baltimore mall, but also the aftermath of the disappearance on the girls and their parents and the culture of “missing persons” that has evolved over the past thirty years. The author makes an interesting choice in portraying Baltimore and its police as supporting characters to the primary drama that belongs to the girls and their family. When the victim of an auto accident claims to be one of the missing girls who has resurfaced thirty years later with a less-than-credible account of what happened and where she has been all those years, it is hard for the savvy mystery reader to believe that it will take nearly three-hundred and fifty pages to get at the true story-–but it does, because Lippman is a masterful storyteller, slipping easily between past and present, never focusing exclusively on any one protagonist for too long, and giving us just enough insight at each chapter’s end to make us want to plunge into the next section. I got so wrapped up in this book over Thanksgiving weekend, I forgot to go out and be a good consumer.
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What the Dead Know: A Novel by Laura Lippman
prettypilgrim, November 26, 2007
What appears at first to be a well-written mystery of the police procedural variety turns out to be a truly fascinating character study. Laura Lippman achieves this feat by the use of creative flashbacks and pain-staking research that illuminate not just the day in 1975 when two teenage girls disappeared from a suburban Baltimore mall, but also the aftermath of the disappearance on the girls and their parents and the culture of “missing persons” that has evolved over the past thirty years. The author makes an interesting choice in portraying Baltimore and its police as supporting characters to the primary drama that belongs to the girls and their family. When the victim of an auto accident claims to be one of the missing girls who has resurfaced thirty years later with a less-than-credible account of what happened and where she has been all those years, it is hard for the savvy mystery reader to believe that it will take nearly three-hundred and fifty pages to get at the true story-–but it does, because Lippman is a masterful storyteller, slipping easily between past and present, never focusing exclusively on any one protagonist for too long, and giving us just enough insight at each chapter’s end to make us want to plunge into the next section. I got so wrapped up in this book over Thanksgiving weekend, I forgot to go out and be a good consumer.(6 of 11 readers found this comment helpful)