To the Power of Three (Tess Monaghan Mysteries)

Laura Lippman is one of the most acclaimed authors of crime fiction writing today, the winner of every major award the genre has to offer. Now she dazzles once again with a riveting stand-alone novel that takes on the secret — and not-so-secret — lives of teenage girls, illuminating a dark tragedy with startling clarity and unique empathy.

To the Power of Three

The three girls have been inseparable best friends since the third grade — Josie, the athletic one; Perri, the brilliant, acerbic drama queen; and Kat, the beauty, who also has brains, grace, and a heart open to all around her. But their last day of high school becomes their final day together after one of them brings a gun to school to resolve a mysterious feud. When the police arrive, they discover two wounded girls, one so critically that she is not expected to recover. The third girl is dead, killed instantly by a shot to the heart.

What transpired that morning at Glendale High rocks the foundation of an affluent community in Baltimore's distant suburbs, a place that has barely recovered from an earlier, more comprehensible tragedy. For the shell-shocked parents, teachers, administrators, and students, healing must begin with answers to the usual questions — but only if the answers are safe ones, answers that will lead back to one girl and one family and absolve everyone else.

For Homicide Sgt. Harold Lenhardt, this case is a mystery with more twists than these grief-stricken suburbanites are willing to acknowledge — and the sole lucid survivor, a girl with a teenager's uncanny knack for stonewalling, strikes him as being less than honest. What is she concealing? Is she trying to protect herself or someone else? Even the simplest secrets can kill — and kill again if no one is willing to confront them.

Breathtaking in its emotional depth, powerful, provocative, and consistently surprising, Laura Lippman's To the Power of Threecarries the crime novel into richer, more fertile territory. It is the crowning achievement to date in an already exemplary literary career.

Three former best friends are discovered shot in a locked girls' restroom at a suburban Baltimore high school--one is dead, one is critically injured from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, and the third is clearly lying.

One of the most acclaimed authors in crime fiction pens a realistic and surprising tale about three high school girls who have been friends since childhood, the secrets that pull them apart, and the ultimate betrayal.

Laura Lippman was a newspaper reporter at the Baltimore Sun for twelve years. Her Tess Monaghan novels — The Last Place, The Sugar House, Baltimore Blues, Charm City, Butchers Hill, and In Big Trouble — have won the Edgar, Agatha, Shamus, Anthony, and Nero Wolfe Awards, and In a Strange City was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed novel Every Secret Thing. Lippman lives in Baltimore, Maryland.