The California dream weavers have invaded Charm City with their cameras, their stars, and their controversy....

When private investigator Tess Monaghan literally runs into the crew of the fledgling TV series Mann of Steel while sculling, she expects sharp words and evil looks, not an assignment. But the company has been plagued by a series of disturbing incidents since its arrival on location in Baltimore: bad press, union threats, and small, costly on-set "accidents" that have wreaked havoc with its shooting schedule. As a result, Mann's creator, Flip Tumulty, the son of a Hollywood legend, is worried for the safety of his young female lead, Selene Waites, and asks Tess to serve as her bodyguard/babysitter. Tumulty's concern may be well founded. Not long ago a Baltimore man was discovered dead in his own home, surrounded by photos of the beautiful, difficult superstar-in-the-making.

In the past, Tess has had enough trouble guarding her own body. Keeping a spoiled movie princess under wraps may be more than she can handle — even with the help of Tess's icily unflappable friend Whitney — since Selene is not as naive as everyone seems to think, and far more devious than she initially appears to be. This is not Tess's world. And these are not her kind of people, with their vanities, their self-serving agendas and invented personas, and their remarkably skewed visions of reality — from the series' aging, shallow, former pretty-boy leading man to its resentful, always-on-the-make co-writer to the officious young assistant who may be too hungry for her own good.

But the fish-out-of-water P.I. is abruptly pulled back in by an occurrence she's all too familiar with — murder. Suddenly the wall of secrets around Mann of Steel is in danger of toppling, leaving shattered dreams, careers, and lives scattered among the ruins — a catastrophe that threatens the people Tess cares about...and the city she loves.

"Devotees of Laura Lippman's Baltimore crime novel series must have felt vindicated last year when her subtle, stand-alone thriller 'What the Dead Know' won critical acclaim for its psychological depth and narrative complexity. The story, of two young sisters who disappear from a Baltimore shopping mall in 1975 and of a disoriented woman who, decades later, claims to be the younger girl, revealed not... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) only Lippman's versatility but also her talent for excavating the darker human emotions. The writing was even compared to that of Ruth Rendell.

Now, with 'Another Thing to Fall,' the 10th novel featuring Baltimore private investigator Tess Monaghan, Lippman returns to more familiar ground.

Or does she? The first chapter is nicely unsettling. A man takes photographs of an unsuspecting woman. She is 'sipping one of those enormous coffee drinks that all the young people seemed to carry now. ... He imagined a world of twenty-somethings, their mouths puckering around nothingness, lost without something to suck.' He marvels at her innocent face, 'so guileless and genuine. So everything she wasn't' and recalls the teasing image of Lolita, 'the movie version, of course.'

With such a brooding voyeur stalking such a clueless victim, nastiness seems imminent. For the moment, however, menace recedes as the novel steps out of the shadows into the sharp light of a Baltimore autumn and the glare of a television drama set. 'Mann of Steel,' a partly historical drama, is being filmed in the city, a fact that is brought home to Tess Monaghan when she accidentally rows into the path of the film crew's motor launch and capsizes. As our heroine dries off in a company trailer, the plot gets underway. Flip Tumulty, the series director, having learned that Tess is a private investigator, offers her a job 'babysitting' Selene Waites, the show's wayward star. Photographs of Selene have been found in the house of a local man who committed suicide, and subsequent vandalism on the set may be connected to that grisly coincidence.

Tess accepts the assignment, but only after she and Flip engage in a quick round of banter. 'Sounds like Quantum Leap meets Red Baker by way of The Dancing Cavalier,' Tess observes when Flip describes his silly time-travel plot.

The director is surprised, but the reader is not; this sleuth is, after all, a highly literate former newspaper reporter. Or, as the astonished Flip puts it, 'You're a rower who reads the New Yorker?' Further examples of Tess' prodigious knowledge — of movies, books, television shows, food, firearms, policing, law, nature (human and otherwise), Baltimore (then and now) — surface throughout this rapidly deflating novel in asides that seem to exist for that sole purpose. ('A real Baltimore boy would know that National Bohemian had pulled up stakes long ago. Tourists could buy the gear at a Fells Point shop ... but the beer itself was brewed out of state. Tess actively boycotted it.')

These pronouncements are delivered with irritating prissiness, a relatively new Monaghan trait. 'I won't speak to your Oedipal issues,' Tess informs Flip. She has already told skinny Selene that 'We accept our height. ... We should accept our body types, too, not fight to be what we're not.' Easy for 'a D-cup' to say, grumbles Selene, but the anorexic, manipulative movie star doesn't stand a chance. There is apparently nothing that her big-breasted, straight-talking Baltimore nanny-minder does not know or cannot master.

As in previous novels, Monaghan occasionally meets her match. Here she trades verbal jabs with Lottie MacKenzie, the tiny but tough production manager, who 'appeared to be a precocious sixth-grader who happened to be in charge of a $25 million production,' and Ben Marcus, the slick television writer with a weakness for young flesh.

But it takes a brutal homicide to test the Monaghan mettle — and to revive the badly stalled plot. Once a crew member is battered to death, the interior monologues of Marcus and, more tellingly, those of an unidentified watcher who is connected to the mysterious suicide victim add weight to the airy narrative. Even the vacuous Selene acquires some depth. 'Men always believe they're in charge,' Tess tells one of Selene's lovers. 'But, in my opinion, women make a lot of things happen, and let men think it was their idea.'

Similarly, good crime novelists make a lot of things happen and let readers know only so much. Lippman did just that, to great effect, in 'What the Dead Know.' In 'Another Thing to Fall,' however, she explains more than she suggests. As clues accumulate and the action intensifies, characters even commit the ultimate crime of telling each other what is happening or has happened. This 'harking back to make up' is as tedious now as it was when Henry James sniffed at it (in his preface to 'The Ambassadors'). Worse still are Lippman's repeated digressions on the entertainment industry. Tess, for instance, whines to herself that 'after just two days among the Hollywood crowd, she longed for a good nature analogy, a food metaphor, or even a reference to one of Aesop's fables,' rather than the constant references to other movies.

After 300 or so pages, we know how she feels."

Reviewed by Anna Mundow, a literary columnist for the Boston Globe and a contributor to the Irish Times, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"Tess's latest leaves you fully satisfied but looking forward to next time." Kirkus Reviews

The New York Times bestselling author of What the Dead Know is back with an indelible tale that probes the darkest recesses of the human heart.

The California dream weavers have invaded Charm City with their cameras, their stars, and their controversy. . . .

When private investigator Tess Monaghan literally runs into the crew of the fledgling TV series Mann of Steel while sculling, she expects sharp words and evil looks, not an assignment. But the company has been plagued by a series of disturbing incidents since its arrival on location in Baltimore: bad press, union threats, and small, costly on-set "accidents" that have wreaked havoc with its shooting schedule. As a result, Mann's creator, Flip Tumulty, the son of a Hollywood legend, is worried for the safety of his young female lead, Selene Waites, and asks Tess to serve as her bodyguard/babysitter. Tumulty's concern may be well founded. Not long ago a Baltimore man was discovered dead in his own home, surrounded by photos of the beautiful, difficult superstar-in-the-making.

In the past, Tess has had enough trouble guarding her own body. Keeping a spoiled movie princess under wraps may be more than she can handle—even with the help of Tess's icily unflappable friend Whitney—since Selene is not as naive as everyone seems to think, and far more devious than she initially appears to be. This is not Tess's world. And these are not her kind of people, with their vanities, their self-serving agendas and invented personas, and their remarkably skewed visions of reality—from the series' aging, shallow, former pretty-boy leading man to its resentful, always-on-the-make cowriter to the officious young assistant who may be too hungry for her own good.

But the fish-out-of-water P.I. is abruptly pulled back in by an occurrence she's all too familiar with—murder. Suddenly the wall of secrets around Mann of Steel is in danger of toppling, leaving shattered dreams, careers, and lives scattered among the ruins—a catastrophe that threatens the people Tess cares about . . . and the city she loves.

Laura Lippman was a newspaper reporter at the Baltimore Sun for twelve years. Her previous novel, What the Dead Know, was a New York Times bestseller. Her Tess Monaghan books — By a Spider's Thread, 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. Lippman is also the author of the critically acclaimed stand-alone novel Every Secret Thing. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.