I'd Know You Anywhere

Laura Lippman

Tess Monaghan is missing from the latest novel by Baltimore's favorite crime writer. I'd Know You Anywhere is a psychological, well not a thriller exactly, but it has plenty of suspense and a serial killer of sorts.

Lippman takes the reader into the mind of an adult survivor of a childhood kidnapping and rape. The main character, let's call her Eliza, is living her life cautiously with a husband and two children when she gets a letter from the man  who snatched her when she was fifteen years old. Warren has been on death row for more than twenty years and Eliza's testimony, about the kidnapping and murder of thirteen year old Holly, had helped to convict him. Now the inmate wants to talk to her.

The logic of plot development dictates from the moment the letter arrives that Eliza will go and visit Warren in prison. The suspense in the book rides on a question: why did he let Eliza live when he killed the others?

Eliza has become a fearful person, always sleeping with the windows closed, worried that the world will intrude into her privacy, that she will again become a public spectacle as she was during the trial, that her own children will learn from someone else, before she is ready to tell them, what happened to her in 1985, that her own young daughter will blunder unknowingly into a similar situation.

In the end, at the "death house" as Warren is about to be executed, Eliza is faced with a difficult choice. This is also dictated by the logic of plot development. You'll have to read the book to find out what that choice is. Don't read ahead, that's cheating.

This post is in the 63rd



Published at Mysteries In Paradise.