Binging on Laura Lippman

I feel like I'm a preteen, devouring Nancy Drew, at a pop of one a day, over my summer vacation, sitting in the dining room by the window with the violets in it. What innocent escapism. But 50 years later, I am reading Laura Lippman, who I discovered in my search to read only award winning authors for the rest of the year.

Lippman is noted for her Tess Monaghan series and I have intentionally avoided those, first looking for stand alone stories. The first I read was I'd Know You Anywhere, a story very much like the recent headlines of young girls abducted and ultimately found by either sexual predators or serial killers. Lippman lards her story with ancillary characters influencing the flow and denoument, like the anti-death penalty advocate and her diminished older sister. A good story of character ... how people can and cannot change their "stripes."

Next I read her Life Sentences, a story about young girls growing up and apart in Baltimore. The major plot entailed a woman who went to jail rather than provide any information about what happened to her missing child. While at first glance the back story seemed to be about disclosing the identity of the child's father, the uber plot pondered how much your childhood friends changed from when you first knew them. A solid B- mystery.

The third one I finished is In a Strange City, this one a Tess Moynahan installment. I liked this one. It reminded me of the speculative reconstruction of Poe's death that I read last year or so and also of the book about the museum dedicated to one's life and love set in the mid-East, a review that I never finished writing. Here the mysterious man who leaves a half full bottle of brandy and three red roses at the grave of EAP each year on the anniversary is the pivot point of the plot. But the over story is an exploration about why certain memorabilia play such an important part in the lives of both collectors and everyone. Tess herself is refurbishing a dilpidated house, pondering how "authentic" to restore it. Supporting characters and prime suspects are all engaged in collecting things, whether kitsch or museum quality.

She writes: "But this feeling -- this was the reason people fought to save buildings and why things, mere things, sometimes mattered. It was not because of the old Santayana cliche, the one about being condemned to repeat the past if you failed to remember it. Remembering one's mistakes was no talisman; Tess had repeated her own over and over again in full knowledge. The past was worth remembering and knowing in its own right. It was not behind us, never truly behind us, but under us, holding us up, a foundation for all that was to come and everything that had ever been."

Her characters steal and horde for profit, because they think they are more deserving than the current owner, to articulate their own personal rendition of what's important historically. But all of us describe out personality and our heritage by our possessions. Coincidentally, in today's New York Times, a woman wrote about her childhood interest in doll houses and how that urge to create and control space resurfaced with her first too tiny NYC apartment. How that echoed my recent flourish with recreating miniature rooms and its expansion into compulsive redecorating our house. I still want people to know me through space and decor. I guess I am not that unusual.