Reading Laura Lippman is like reading Dick Francis: if you like revisiting a variation on a plot, you're happy with the talented technique. Lippman writes about crime in Baltimore, crimes involving pre-teen girls, depicting single parent households and strained race relations, both contributing factors in the lives of the criminals, victims, survivors, investigators and counselors. Everyone appears tainted by the poverty and white flight from the city. Crime is inevitable but somehow unsympathetic.
After my first Lippman, I reserved all I could track down. One I couldn't even pretend to get into. Every Secret Thing is engaging, if formulaic. Two white girls, aged 11, abduct a black infant, the granddaughter of a prominent judge. Both are sentenced to seven years in juvenile facilities as it is impossible to determine which of them killed the baby. Upon there release and return to their old neighborhood, another black toddler disappears. Suspicion focuses on them, directed by the mother of their first victim. Everyone, every woman, in the book is flawed: the said mother and her marriage and her relation or lack thereof with her replacement daughter; the investigating newswoman; the policewoman who found the first victim and seems to have been selected again to take a fall; the self-aggrandizing defense lawyer who may herself be the illegitimate daughter of a former mayor; etc etc. Lippman loads the story with losers.
Nonetheless, she still weaves a plot with hidden clues and surprise, if out of left field, endings. Good enough to make me move on to her What the Dead Know.
PS The day after: finished What the Dead Know and found it way too over-constructed. This plot has two sisters being abducted and a woman showing up thirty years later claiming to be one of them but reluctant to reveal her assumed identity in order to preserve her anonymity. The Baltimore detectives return along with the themes of dissolving families. Not as good as EST.
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