Created by Laura Lippman
“Sometimes he used to wake up in the middle of the night and find her looking at him. The light from the streetlamp threw a stripe across her eyes, and it was as if she were wearing a mask that allowed her to read his every thought.”
— Is it noir enough for ya?
If you’re not squirming after reading the opening pages of Laura Lippman’s hot, sweaty standalone Sunburn (2018), a twisted, twisty slice of nasty if there ever was one, well, you’ve never really had a bad sunburn.
But don’t worry. By the end of this gripping little noir, everyone gets burned… one way or another. Lippman has been threatening this one for at least as long as I’ve known her. Acting like a One-Woman Chamber of Commerce for Charm City’s Vaunted Coterie of Crime Writers (Poe, Hammett, James M. Cain, that Simon guy, etc.), she finally raises a little Cain of her own, resulting in a blistering bit of noir.
Of course, anyone who’s ever read her Tess Monaghan detective novels or, especially, her potent standalones, knows that–sunny disposition aside–Lippman has always had a heart of darkness in her writing that can beat like a hammer on a drum. Here she shows it to the world.
Pale, red-haired Polly is sitting on a barstool in Belleville, Delaware, a sad little nowhere town 45 miles from the beach.
Study alpha male ADAM BOSK slides onto a nearby stool, and ponders the severely sunburned shoulders of Polly.
“Pink, peeling. The burn is two days old, he gauges. Earned on Friday, painful to the touch yesterday, today an itchy soreness that’s hard not to keep fingering, probing…”
Two good-looking people, there’s a mutual attraction almost immediately, and before you know it they’re lying their asses off to each other–and the reader.
But Adam is actually a private investigator who’s been hired to “get to know” Polly. She’s headed west, she claims, on the lam from a busted marriage, a doofus husband and a three-year old daughter in her wake. But she needs money…
She lands a gig as a waitress, he gets hired as a cook for the summer at the same place.
Adam’s secrets are more or less what you’d expect, at least at first, but they’re nothing compared to those of shapeshifter Polly (if that’s even her real name), who has secrets tucked inside of secrets, wrapped in lies and more lies, and dusted with greed, betrayal, lust and murder–all eventually to be scorched by the harsh, relentless, burning Light of Truth.
Pass the Coppertone.
UNDER OATH
- “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 - “Suspenseful as hell, and she writes like a dream […] Lippman’s always good, but this is a cut above.”
— Stephen King - “A redheaded waitress, a good-looking private eye, insurance fraud, arson, rough sex, and a long hot summer: some like it noir… Plotty, page-turning pleasure plus instructions on how to make a perfect grilled cheese sandwich and how to stab a man in the heart.”
— Kirkus Reviews
NOVELS
- Sunburn (2018) | Buy this book | Buy the audio | Kindle it!
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
