Download or read book Baltimore Blues written by Laura Lippman and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 death should be just another statistic. But the slain lawyer's notoriety -- and his noontime trysts with Rock's fiancee -- make the case front page news...and points to Rock as the likely murderer. But trying to prove her friend's innocence couls prove costly to Tess -- and add her name to that infamous ever-growing list.
Download or read book Charm City written by Laura Lippman and published by Avon. This book was released on 1997 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a practiced reporter until her newspaper went to that great pressroom in the sky, P.I. Tess Monaghan knows and loves every inch of her native Baltimore, even the parts being slobbered on by the sad-sack greyhound she's minding for her uncle. It's a quirky city where baseball reigns, but lately homicide seems to be the second most popular local sport. Business tycoon "Wink" Wynkowski is trying to change all that by bringing pro basketball back to town, and everybody's rooting fro him -- until a devastating, muckraking expose of his lurid past appears on the front page of the Baltimore Beacon-Light. It's a surprise even to the Blight's editors, who thought they'd killed the piece. Instead, the piece killed Wink -- who's found in his garage with the car running. Now the Blight wants to nail the unknown computer hacker who planted the lethal story, and the assignment is right up the alley of a former newshound like Tess. But it doesn't take long for her to discover deeper, darker secrets, and to realize that this situation is really more about whacking than hacking. It's just murder in Baltimore these days -- and Tess Monaghan herself might be next on the list. As a practiced reporter until her newspaper went to that great pressroom in the sky, P.I. Tess Monaghan knows and loves every inch of her native Baltimore, even the parts being slobbered on by the sad-sack greyhound she's minding for her uncle. It's a quirky city where baseball reigns, but lately homicide seems to be the second most popular local sport. Business tycoon "Wink" Wynkowski is trying to change all that by bringing pro basketball back to town, and everybody's rooting for him -- until a devastating, muckraking expose of his lurid past appears on the front page of the Baltimore Beacon-Light. It's a surprise even to the Blight's editors, who thought they'd killed the piece. Instead, the piece killed Wink -- who's found in his garage with the car running. Now the Blight wants to nail the unknown computer hacker who planted the lethal story, and the assignment is right up the alley of a former newshound like Tess. But it doesn't take long for her to discover deeper, darker secrets, and to realize that this situation is really more about whacking than hacking. It's just murder in Baltimore these days -- and Tess Monaghan herself might be next on the list.
Download or read book Hush Hush written by Laura Lippman and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times bestselling author Laura Lippman plunges Baltimore private investigator Tess Monaghan into a twisted and disturbing case. Tess Monaghan has encountered almost every possible criminal motive throughout her career: greed, revenge, jealousy, rage. But there are crimes that defy all attempts at understanding, where a search for motive seems pointless. Melisandre Harris Dawes committed such a crime. Found not guilty by reason of insanity, she fled the country, leaving her two daughters with their father. Twelve years later, she’s back in Baltimore, and Tess is asked to provide security detail while Melisandre films a documentary about her attempts to reconcile with her now teenaged children. Tess, juggling work with caring for her demanding toddler, is uneasy about the case. Still, Melisandre’s lawyer is family. And there is something about the woman herself—confident, beautiful, shrewdly intelligent—that draws Tess in. Is she a master manipulator or someone who was driven to temporary madness? Cold and calculating, or a mother concerned for her daughters’ well being? Someone is leaving Melisandre enigmatic, threatening notes. Soon Tess, insecure about her parenting abilities and receiving cryptic messages of her own, isn’t sure whether she should be protecting Melisandre from harm—or protecting everyone else from Melisandre. When Melisandre becomes the prime suspect in a murder, Tess must uncover the truth. Doing so will mean confronting her deepest beliefs about what separates good parents from bad, madness from sanity, and what lengths even the most rational person will go to, to protect what they cherish most.
Download or read book No Good Deeds LP written by Laura Lippman and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2007-01-23 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author Laura Lippman’s Tess Monaghan—first introduced in the classic Baltimore Blues—becomes involved in a complicated investigation that will force her to question her loyalties. For Tess Monaghan, the unsolved murder of a young federal prosecutor is nothing more than a theoretical problem, one of several cases to be deconstructed in her new gig as a consultant to the local newspaper. But it becomes all too tangible when her boyfriend, Crow, brings home a young street kid who’s a juvenile con artist and who doesn’t even realize he holds an important key to the sensational homicide. Tess agrees to protect the boy’s identity no matter what, especially when one of his friends is killed in what appears to be a case of mistaken identity. But as she soon discovers, her ethical decision to protect him has dire consequences. And with federal agents determined to learn the boy’s name at any cost, Tess finds out just how far even official authorities will go to get what they want. It isn’t long before Tess finds herself facing felony charges. To make matters worse, Crow has gone into hiding with his young protégé. So Tess can’t deliver the kid to investigators even if she wants to. Now her only recourse is to get to the heart of the sordid and deadly affair while they're all still free...and still breathing.
Download or read book After I m Gone written by Laura Lippman and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-02-11 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Laura Lippman, the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of The Most Dangerous Thing, I’d Know You Anywhere, and What the Dead Know, returns with an addictive story that explores how one man’s disappearance echoes through the lives of the wife, mistress, and daughters he left behind. 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 money—might be, she suspects one woman does: his mistress, Julie. When Julie disappears ten years to the day that Felix went on the lam, everyone assumes she’s left to join her old lover—until her remains are eventually found. Now, twenty-six years after Julie went missing, Roberto “Sandy” Sanchez, a retired Baltimore detective working cold cases for some extra cash, is investigating her murder. What he discovers is a tangled web stretching over three decades that connects five intriguing women. And at the center is the missing man Felix Brewer. Somewhere between the secrets and lies connecting past and present, Sandy will find the truth. And when he does, no one will ever be the same.
Download or read book The Girl in the Green Raincoat LP written by Laura Lippman and published by HarperLuxe. This book was released on 2011-01-18 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the third trimester of her pregnancy, Baltimore private investigator Tess Monaghan is under doctor's orders to remain immobile. Bored and restless, reduced to watching the world go by outside her window, she takes small comfort in the mundane events she observes . . . like the young woman in a green raincoat who walks her dog at the same time every day. Then one day the dog is running free and its owner is nowhere to be seen. Certain that something is terribly wrong, and incapable of leaving well enough alone, Tess is determined to get to the bottom of the dog walker's abrupt disappearance, even if she must do so from her own bedroom. But her inquisitiveness is about to fling open a dangerous Pandora's box of past crimes and troubling deaths . . . and she's not only putting her own life in jeopardy but also her unborn child's. Previously serialized in the New York Times, and now published in book form for the very first time, The Girl in the Green Raincoat is a masterful Hitchcockian thriller from one of the very best in the business: multiple award-winner Laura Lippman.
Download or read book By a Spider s Thread written by Laura Lippman and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2015-03-03 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A very special kind of twisted genius.' SARAH HILARY 'A gripping thriller.' Woman's Own 'One of the best crime novelists writing today.' TESS GERRITSEN 'A hair-raising ride.' Boston Globe A TESS MONAGHAN MYSTERY P. I. Tess Monaghan breaks her 'no domestic disputes' rule when she takes on the case of Natalie Rubin, a middle-class wife and mother of three, who has vanished without trace and taken her young children with her. Her husband, Mark, is devastated - he thought they were happy - but Tess is left uneasy by his evident desire to control his wife. Was that the reason that she fled? In her search for Natalie and her children, Tess uncovers explosive secrets that the family has been hiding and the question remains, how far would they go to keep their secrets hidden forever? 'Nice characters, always surprising, never dull, just wonderful!!' 5* reader review 'An enticing read. Once I started, I didn't want to put the book down.' 5* reader review 'A great thriller - I highly recommend it!' 5* reader review 'A totally complete mystery novel!' 5* reader review
Download or read book Every Secret Thing written by Laura Lippman and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-08-16 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From critically acclaimed, multiple-award winner Laura Lippman comes a riveting story of love and murder, guilt and innocence Two little girls banished from a neighborhood birthday party find an abandoned stroller with an infant inside on an unfamiliar Baltimore street. What happens next is shocking and terrible, causing the irreparable devastation of three separate families. Seven years later, Alice Manning and Ronnie Fuller, now eighteen, are released from “kid prison” to begin their lives over again. But the secrets swirling around the original crime continue to haunt the parents, the lawyers, the police, and all the adults in Alice and Ronnie’s lives. And now another child has disappeared, under freakishly similar circumstances.
Download or read book Sunburn written by Laura Lippman and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-02-20 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Every time Laura Lippman comes out with a new book, I get chills because I know I am back in the hands of the master. She is simply a brilliant novelist, an unflinching chronicler of life in America right now, and Sunburn is her dark, gleaming noir gem. Read it." -Gillian Flynn, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Gone Girl New York Times bestselling author Laura Lippman returns with a superb novel of psychological suspense about a pair of lovers with the best intentions and the worst luck: two people locked in a passionate yet uncompromising game of cat and mouse. But instead of rules, this game has dark secrets, forbidden desires, inevitable betrayals—and cold-blooded murder. One is playing a long game. But which one? They meet at a local tavern in the small town of Belleville, Delaware. Polly is set on heading west. Adam says he’s also passing through. Yet she stays and he stays—drawn to this mysterious redhead whose quiet stillness both unnerves and excites him. Over the course of a punishing summer, Polly and Adam abandon themselves to a steamy, inexorable affair. Still, each holds something back from the other—dangerous, even lethal, secrets. Then someone dies. Was it an accident, or part of a plan? By now, Adam and Polly are so ensnared in each other’s lives and lies that neither one knows how to get away—or even if they want to. Is their love strong enough to withstand the truth, or will it ultimately destroy them? Something—or someone—has to give. Which one will it be? Inspired by James M. Cain’s masterpieces The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and Mildred Pierce, Sunburn is a tantalizing modern noir from the incomparable Laura Lippman.
Download or read book The Silent Shore written by Charles L. Chavis Jr. and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive account of the lynching of twenty-three-year-old Matthew Williams in Maryland, the subsequent investigation, and the legacy of "modern-day" lynchings. On December 4, 1931, a mob of white men in Salisbury, Maryland, lynched and set ablaze a twenty-three-year-old Black man named Matthew Williams. His gruesome murder was part of a wave of silent white terrorism in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929, which exposed Black laborers to white rage in response to economic anxieties. For nearly a century, the lynching of Matthew Williams has lived in the shadows of the more well-known incidents of racial terror in the deep South, haunting both the Eastern Shore and the state of Maryland as a whole. In The Silent Shore, author Charles L. Chavis Jr. draws on his discovery of previously unreleased investigative documents to meticulously reconstruct the full story of one of the last lynchings in Maryland. Bringing the painful truth of anti-Black violence to light, Chavis breaks the silence that surrounded Williams's death. Though Maryland lacked the notoriety for racial violence of Alabama or Mississippi, he writes, it nonetheless was the site of at least 40 spectacle lynchings after the abolition of slavery in 1864. Families of lynching victims rarely obtained any form of actual justice, but Williams's death would have a curious afterlife: Maryland's politically ambitious governor Albert C. Ritchie would, in an attempt to position himself as a viable challenger to FDR, become one of the first governors in the United States to investigate the lynching death of a Black person. Ritchie tasked Patsy Johnson, a member of the Pinkerton detective agency and a former prizefighter, with going undercover in Salisbury and infiltrating the mob that murdered Williams. Johnson would eventually befriend a young local who admitted to participating in the lynching and who also named several local law enforcement officers as ringleaders. Despite this, a grand jury, after hearing 124 witness statements, declined to indict the perpetrators. But this denial of justice galvanized Governor Ritchie's Interracial Commission, which would become one of the pioneering forces in the early civil rights movement in Maryland. Complicating historical narratives associated with the history of lynching in the city of Salisbury, The Silent Shore explores the immediate and lingering effect of Williams's death on the politics of racism in the United States, the Black community in Salisbury, the broader Eastern Shore, the state of Maryland, and the legacy of "modern-day lynchings."
Download or read book Another Thing to Fall written by Laura Lippman and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author Laura Lippman’s Tess Monaghan—first introduced in the classic Baltimore Blues—must protect an up-and-coming Hollywood actress, but when murder strikes on a TV set, the unflappable PI discovers everyone’s got a secret. “[A] welcome addition to Tess Monaghan’s adventures and an insightful look at the desperation that drives those grasping for a shot at fame and those who will do anything to keep it.”—San Francisco Chronicle When private investigator Tess Monaghan literally runs into the crew of the fledgling TV series Mann of Steel while sculling, she expects sharp words and evil looks, not an assignment. But the company has been plagued by a series of disturbing incidents since its arrival on location in Baltimore: bad press, union threats, and small, costly on-set "accidents" that have wreaked havoc with its shooting schedule. As a result, Mann's creator, Flip Tumulty, the son of a Hollywood legend, is worried for the safety of his young female lead, Selene Waites, and asks Tess to serve as her bodyguard. Tumulty's concern may be well founded. Recently, a Baltimore man was discovered dead in his home, surrounded by photos of the beautiful—if difficult—aspiring star. In the past, Tess has had enough trouble guarding her own body. Keeping a spoiled movie princess under wraps may be more than she can handle since Selene is not as naive as everyone seems to think, and instead is quite devious. Once Tess gets a taste of this world of make-believe—with their vanities, their self-serving agendas, and their remarkably skewed visions of reality—she’s just about ready to throw in the towel. But she’s pulled back in when a grisly on-set murder occurs, threatening to topple the wall of secrets surrounding Mann of Steel as lives, dreams, and careers are scattered among the ruins.
Download or read book The Devil s Shadow written by Hugh Holton and published by Forge Books. This book was released on 2002-06-17 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Devil's Shadow, Commander Larry Cole is confronted with the most beautiful and cunning criminal he's ever faced. Julianna Saint has a reputation for getting anything she wants. Her occupation, international thief. Her notoriety has spread from the underworld to the Chicago mob boss, Jake Romano, who has heard that no matter how tight the security, no matter what precautions are taken, Julianna can steal it. Jake wants her to pull off a nearly impossible heist of the North Michigan Avenue Bank. When the robbery goes awry, Julianna makes a daring escape, setting Larry Cole on her trail. He follows Julianna to a palatial estate in the Caribbean with the intent of bringing her down. But Julianna is prepared and will use everything she has, on her own terms, and on her own turf. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book Debbie Doesn t Do It Anymore written by Walter Mosley and published by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard. This book was released on 2015-02-03 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Millions of men and (no doubt many) women have watched famed black porn queen Debbie Dare—she of the blond wig and blue contacts—“do it” on television and computer screens in every combination of partners and positions imaginable. But after an unexpected and thunderous on-set orgasm catches her unawares, Debbie returns home to find her porn-producer husband dead, electrocuted in their hot tub in the midst of “auditioning” an aspiring young starlet. Burdened with massive debt—incurred by her husband, and which various L.A. heavies want to collect on—Debbie must find a way to extricate herself from the peculiar subculture of the porn industry and reconcile herself to sacrifices she’s made along the way. In Debbie Doesn’t Do it Anymore, the creator of the Easy Rawlins series has painted a moving portrait of a resilient soul in search of salvation and a cure for grief.
Download or read book My Life as a Villainess written by Laura Lippman and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times bestselling author Laura Lippman, a journalist for many years, collects here her recent essays exploring motherhood as an older mom, her life as a reader, her relationships with her parents, friendship, and other topics that will resonate with a large audience. Her voice is wry and relatable, her takes often surprising. Meet the Woman Behind the Books… In this collection of new and previously published essays, New York Times bestselling author Laura Lippman offers her take on a woman's life across the decades. Her childhood and school years, her newspaper career, her experiences as a novelist—Lippman finds universal touchstones in an unusual life that has as many twists as her award-winning crime fiction. Essays include: · Men Explain The Wire to Me · Game of Crones · My Life as a Villainess · My Father’s Bar · The 31st Stocking These candid essays offer long-time readers insight into the experiences that helped Lippman become one of the most successful crime novelists of her generation.
Download or read book Dream Girl written by Laura Lippman and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Booklist Editors' Choice! Called One of the Best Mystery Books by NPR, Washington Post, Crime Reads, Library Journal, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, and Dublin City Library! "With this tip of the hat to Stephen King's Misery, Dream Girl is funny and suspenseful, with a dread-worthy final twist." —People “My dream novel. I devoured this in three days. The sharpest, clearest-eyed take on our #MeToo reckoning yet. Plus: enthralling." —Megan Abbott, Edgar Award-winning author of Dare Me and The Fever Following up on her acclaimed and wildly successful New York Times bestseller Lady in the Lake, Laura Lippman returns with a dark, complex tale of psychological suspense with echoes of Misery involving a novelist, incapacitated by injury, who is plagued by mysterious phone calls. Aubrey, the title character of Gerry Andersen’s most successful novel, Dream Girl, is so captivating that Gerry’s readers insist she’s real. Gerry knows she exists only in his imagination. So how can Aubrey be calling Gerry, bed-bound since a freak fall? A virtual prisoner in his penthouse, Gerry is dependent on two women he barely knows: his incurious young assistant, and a dull, slow-witted night nurse. Could the cryptic caller be one of his three ex-wives playing a vindictive trick after all these years? Or is she Margot, an ex-girlfriend who keeps trying to insinuate her way back into Gerry’s life? And why does no one believe that the call even happened? Isolated from the world, drowsy from medication, Gerry slips between reality and dreamlike memories: his faithless father, his devoted mother; the women who loved him, the women he loved. Now here is Aubrey, threatening to visit him, suggesting that Gerry owes her something. Is the threat real or a sign of dementia? Which scenario would he prefer? Gerry has never been so alone, so confused – and so terrified. And then he wakes up to another nightmare—a woman’s dead body next to his bed—and the terrifying uncertainty of whether he is responsible.
Download or read book The Sugar House written by Laura Lippman and published by William Morrow Paperbacks. This book was released on 2016-04-19 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times bestselling author Laura Lippman’s Tess Monaghan must solve one of the most baffling murders in her PI career. When Tess Monaghan agrees to talk to Ruthie Dembrow, she senses she’ll regret it. If there’s anything Tess has learned in her work both as a newspaper reporter and then as a PI, it’s to trust your instincts. Still, she can’t deny she’s intrigued when Ruthie asks her to investigate the fatal stabbing of her brother, Henry, while he was locked away for murdering a teenage runaway over a bottle of glue. Henry’s death at the hands of fellow convicts doesn’t surprise Tess, but what does is that he was convicted for murdering a “Jane Doe”—something that rarely happens in the judicial system. No ID was found on the victim’s body, and her fingerprints didn’t match up to any in the national database. How could anyone escape all the identity nets of the modern world? Ruthie is convinced if she learns the identity of her brother’s victim, maybe she can also find out why he was killed. Tess’s search takes her on a harrowing journey from Baltimore’s exclusive Inner Harbor to the seedy neighborhood of Locust Point. But it’s the shocking discovery of the runaway’s true identity that turns Tess’s hunt deadly. Suddenly, her supposedly solved murder case keeps turning up newer, fresher corpses and scarier versions of the Sugar House—places that look so sweet and safe, but only from the outside.
Download or read book The Most Dangerous Thing written by Laura Lippman and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-08-23 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “One of the best novelists around, period.” —Washington Post “Lippman has enriched literature as a whole. —Chicago Sun-Times One of the most acclaimed novelists in America today, Laura Lippman has greatly expanded the boundaries of mystery fiction and psychological suspense with her Tess Monaghan p.i. series and her New York Times bestselling standalone novels (What the Dead Know, Life Sentences, I’d Know You Anywhere, etc.). With The Most Dangerous Thing, the multiple award winning author—recipient of the Anthony, Edgar®, Shamus, and Agatha Awards, to name but a few—once again demonstrates how storytelling is done to perfection. Set once again in the well-wrought environs of Lippman’s beloved Baltimore, it is the shadowy tale of a group of onetime friends forced to confront a dark past they’ve each tried to bury following the death of one of their number. Rich in the compassion and insight into flawed human nature that has become a Lippman trademark while telling an absolutely gripping story, The Most Dangerous Thing will not be confined by genre restrictions, reaching out instead to captive a wide, diverse audience, from Harlan Coben and Kate Atkinson fans to readers of Jodi Picoult and Kathryn Stockett.
