Every Secret Thing: Summary and book reviews of Every Secret Thing by Laura Lippman, plus links to an excerpt from Every Secret Thing and a biography of Laura Lippman.
Every Secret Thing
by Laura Lippman
Hardcover: Sep 2003,
400 pages.
Paperback: Oct 2004,
432 pages.
Since her debut in 1997, Laura Lippman has won virtually every major prize in the mystery-writing field and earned the highest critical praise for her Tess Monaghan series, which has been called "spectacular" (New York Times), "terrific fun" (Washington Post), "a delight" (Baltimore Sun), and "the best mystery writing around" (Village Voice). Now Lippman steps outside her series to deliver her darkest, most troubling tale -- and vaults into the crime-fiction elite with a haunting story of murder, fate's accidents, and the stories we tell ourselves when we try to make sense of the unthinkable.
On a July afternoon two little girls, banished from a birthday party, take a wrong turn onto an unfamiliar Baltimore street -- and encounter an abandoned stroller with a baby inside it. Dutiful Alice Manning and unpredictable Ronnie Fuller only want to be helpful, to be good. People like children who are good, Alice thinks. But whatever the girls' real intentions, things go horribly awry and three families are destroyed.
Seven years later Alice and Ronnie are heading home again -- only separately this time, their fragile bond long shattered, their secrets still closely kept. Advised to avoid each other, they enter a world where they essentially have no past. In exchange, they are promised a fresh start, the chance to mold their own future.
That promise is broken when a child disappears, under disturbingly similar circumstances. And the adults in Alice's and Ronnie's lives -- the parents, the lawyers, the police -- realize that they must now confront the shattering truths they couldn't face seven years earlier. Or another mother will lose her child.
Homicide detective Nancy Porter was a rookie cop when she solved the original case with a bit of freakish luck -- and almost derailed her own career. Adept at finding the small things that can make or break a homicide case, now she must master the larger picture in order to understand where guilt truly lies. For no one is innocent in this world. Not even the children.
Publishers Weekly
Her deft handling of this disturbing material is sure to increase the breadth of her readership.
Library Journal - Michele Leber
With her first stand-alone novel Lippman proves equally adept at character-based psychological suspense. Essential for popular fiction collections, particularly for fans of Ruth Rendell and Minette Walters.
Booklist - Connie Fletcher
Lippman doesn't write a standard whodunit here but plays with reader expectations of what should happen next. A startling page-turner.
Kirkus Reviews
...a chilling study of mothers, daughters, love, and murder....Lucid, tight, and compelling.
Twelve hours after a woman's body is washed up on a deserted shore her traumatized three-year-old daughter is discovered twenty miles away, alone and apparently abandoned.
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