Laura Lippman

A thief targets a local bookstore and it will take a bibliophile PI to save the shop.
Tess Monaghan wants to like the Children's Bookstore. It's bright, cozy, and packed with the kinds of books that she is dying for her daughter to fall in love with. But no matter how badly she wants to support this adorable local business, the owner's attitude stops her in her tracks. What kind of children's bookseller hates children? What's eating Octavia,...

Amber Glass has spent her entire adult life putting as much distance as possible between her and her hometown of Baltimore, where she fears she will forever be known as "Prom Mom"--the girl who allegedly killed her baby on the night of the prom after her date, Joe Simpson, abandoned her to pursue the girl he really liked. But when circumstances bring Amber back to the city, she realizes she can have a second chance--as long as she stays away from...

When Hector Lewis told his daughter that she had a nothing face, it was just another bit of tossed-off cruelty from a man who specialized in harsh words and harsher deeds. But twenty years later, Heloise considers it a blessing to be a person who knows how to avoid attention. In the comfortable suburb where she lives, she's just a mom, the youngish widow with a forgettable job who somehow never misses a soccer game or a school play. In the state capital,...

A divorced reporter in racially torn 1966 Baltimore triggers unanticipated consequences for vulnerable community members while investigating the murder of an African-American party girl.

Baltimore private investigator Tess Monaghan feels out of her element when she is hired to serve as bodyguard to Selene Waites, the spoiled young star of the big-budget television show "Mann of Steel," but she is on familiar ground when the problems that have been disrupting filming since the show's crew arrived in town escalate to murder.

When Felix Brewer meets Bernadette "Bambi" Gottschalk at a Valentine's Dance in 1959, he charms her with wild promises, some of which he actually keeps. Thanks to his lucrative -- if not all legal -- businesses, she and their three little girls live in luxury. But on the Fourth of July, 1976, Bambi's comfortable world implodes when Felix, newly convicted and facing prison, mysteriously vanishes. Though Bambi has no idea where her husband -- or his...

Collects the author's recent essays exploring motherhood as an older mom, her life as a reader, her relationships with her parents, her newspaper career, and her experiences as a novelist.

Until her paper, the Baltimore Star, crashed and burned, Tess Monaghan was a damn good reporter who knew her hometown intimately--from historic Fort McHenry to the crumbling projects of Cherry Hill. Now gainfully unemployed at twenty-nine, she's willing to take any freelance job to pay the rent--including a bit of unorthodox snooping for her rowing buddy, Darryl "Rock" Paxton. In a city where someone is murdered almost everyday, attorney Michael Abramowitz's...

Private detective Tess Monaghan gets more than she had bargained for when she is hired by Mark Rubin, an Orthodox Jew, to find his missing wife and three children, who had apparently walked away from Rubin with the help of an ex-con named Zeke.