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The Ninth Time Is a Charm
A Review by Kevin Allman

"Smalltimore" -- the little-town interconnectedness between everyone and everything in big-city Baltimore -- informs Laura Lippman's latest Tess Monaghan mystery, No Good Deeds. This time out, the reporter-turned-P.I. is picking up some easy money teaching investigative techniques to greenhorn reporters at the daily paper. Meanwhile, her good-hearted but soft-headed musician boyfriend, Crow, is befriending a teenage would-be criminal who tried to run a penny-level scam on him.

With its varied neighborhoods, tangled politics and surfeit of quirky characters, Baltimore is a town prime for mystery, and Lippman has knotted a taut, intricate tale that leads from City Hall to church soup kitchens and from the tony cul de sacs of Guilford and Roland Park to the mean streets of East Baltimore.

Tess (and Lippman) know the politics of the newsroom as well as the politics of city hall, and her insider eye makes No Good Deeds a pleasure. It doesn't take her long to discover that her consultancy at the Beacon-Light is really an end run around journalistic ethics; since a private eye isn't bound by reportorial principles of conduct, the paper is hoping she can steer them toward some scandalous stories while technically keeping its own hands clean. "Newspapers are so besieged right now," she explains to Crow. "On one hand, they're all playing Caesar's wife, suspending and even firing reporters for even the tiniest slip-ups. But they're also trying to compete with the weekly tabloids on the gossip front." Tess has always been a terrific sleuth, even if her earlier adventures were sometimes uneven. Here, Lippman has pulled off the near-impossible: writing a conventional procedural that still feels fresh. It's impossible not to like the complex, all-too-real Monaghan, a strong, wry detective prone to "derailing my own gravy train." How can you resist a tough cookie who is nonetheless sentimental enough to turn down all work around Valentine's Day, which is to private investigators what April 15 is to accountants?

Kevin Allman is a novelist and reviewer who lives in Portland, Ore.