Life Sentences

Laura Lippman

If you look through this blog you might deduce that I have become a Laura Lippman fan. I've enjoyed tracking down her early work and filling in the history of her detective character, Tess Monaghan and reading her occasional forays into other branches of fiction.

Life Sentences is her newest book and now I am all caught up and will have to wait for her to finish the tedious process of writing another book before I can gobble it up in a weekend.

This is not a Tess Monaghan story. Lippman has created a new central character, Cassandra Fallows, a writer, successful with her first two books, both memoirs, who has tried writing fiction for her third book and met with severe criticism from the critics. She has returned to Baltimore for a visit, making a few stops on her book tour and checking in on her aging parents. She runs across a decades old crime story which, mirable dictu, involves one of her elementary school classmates and decides that her next book will be about this person, her school days and her old friends.

Life Sentences deviates from the crime novel pattern just a bit. Cassandra wants to answer some of the unanswered questions about the mysterious disappearance of her schoolmate's child, as related in a short TV news piece she caught on a local Baltimore station, watching in her hotel room, but nobody ever gets arrested. There are no murders, no criminals are brought to justice. Eventually, no book is written about it. Cassandra Fallows is welcomed back to her home town when she declines to profit from it's dark secret.

Lippman has always made Baltimore the core of her writing. I am not from the city, I live on the Eastern Shore and mostly see Baltimore on the local TV news, yet I find her use of the city and it's environs to be one of the most attractive parts of her writing. In this case the Eastern Shore plays a larger than usual role. I've been to Bridegville Delaware, know Denton fairly well and have traveled the back roads of Kent Island, all of which are ground covered by the characters in Life Sentences.

Being a writer, doing a book tour, getting panned by the critics and mining your home town, your friends and family for material are what this book is about - keeping in mind that this is fiction. The title is a reference to the central character's Sisyphean task of writing endlessly about her past. Perhaps Lippman is feeling a bit Sisyphean herself after writing fifteen books set in her lifelong home.

Butchers Hill

A Tess Monaghan Novel
Laura Lippman

I have become a Laura Lippman addict. I first heard Laura Lippman being interviewed on the Marc Steiner Show on what was then Baltimore's WJHU radio station, at John's Hopkins University. (It's called WYPR now and is no longer owned by the University) I found her to be engaging and was motivated to go read the new novel she was hawking and then every Laura Lippman book I could lay my hands on ever since.

Butchers Hill is an early Lippman novel that was published in paperback only, in 1998. It has recently been released in hard cover, reversing the usual procedure. One might expect an early attempt to be less well written, more tentative, not as good as an author's later work, especially if that early book was a paperback only potboiler. This is not the case. The character of Tess Monaghan is fully rounded already, and easily recognizable. The plot has twists and turns of great complexity, yet complete, after the fact, logic. Other characters are believable. It was a thoroughly enjoyable read. Baltimore is a city that I know mostly from the local TV news. I live in another world, across the Chesapeake Bay from there. But I love to see places and even people from that news appearing in print. If there is a writer who lives and sets novels in your area you may be able to enjoy the same experience. Of course, I also enjoy reading the late Tony Hillerman's New Mexico based novels for their setting, even though my exposure to New Mexico was only a two week vacation almost twenty years ago. Go figure.

You will never in a million years guess who done it, which makes this a real mystery and not just a "crime novel." In fact, it's not at all clear what the real crime that is being solved is until the denouement, but not in a bad plot kind of way.

Since starting to write fiction, with her Tess Monaghan mysteries, Laura Lippman has written novels that are not in the mystery genre. She has shown that she can develop complex characters and hold a reader's interest without having the plot device of a detective with a crime to solve. Yet, her Tess stories, even this early one, already stand up as complete novels on their own.