The Girl in the Green
Raincoat, by Laura Lippman (William Morrow, 193 pages, 2011, $13.99)
She’s Back! And
Shorter!
Our lovely local* Laura Lippman/Tess Monaghan is back in
this novella, first appearing in the New
York Times magazine! (We had mistakenly thought this was a new title.)
And so Begins. . . .
“I am being held hostage. . . The agenda is unclear. The
demands vague but she is prepared to hold me here for two months. Twelve weeks
or eighteen years, depending on how you look at it.”
And so begins, a la Rear
Window, a novella in which we find our protagonist on bed rest for the last
two months of her pregnancy trying to solve a murder or murders that may or may
not have happened.
We Love Baltimore,
But, . . . .
Well, not sure we all do love Baltimore (perhaps not even
Mr. Trump), but we have lived nearby long enough that we are fairly familiar
with the city. Enough so that we recognize when Lippman mentions BG&E and
Hopkins and the Helmand (an Afghan restaurant owned by a brother of the former
leader of Afghanistan), Carroll County and Annapolis, the town. Familiar and
comfortable. Lippman is not a name-dropper but carefully weaves in the
neighborhoods of Baltimore so the Charm City becomes a character in her novels as
well.
Where are the Dogs?
Central. Yes, there is a Dobie, and a Grey and even a biting
foster (found) IG**
who takes over and uses a chamber pot (I kid you not!)
but, in the end, turns out to love the baby and so, he, Dempsey (dog), is
accepted.
Gotta Love Whitney
My favorite character plays a larger role in this story, one
of a dozen Tess Monaghan books and three short stories. Whitney, very very
wealthy Whitney, is assigned to room with Tess in college and they become
unlikely best buddies. Whitney currently lives in a cottage on her parents’
estate and chairs the family foundation at 35, after having held three jobs in
about a dozen years. Whitney is a down-to-earth little rich girl – fascinating.
In The Girl in the Green Raincoat,
Whitney plays a large role as Tess’ assistant (the feet) in solving the crime,
the crime that they solved almost by accident since it was not the one they
thought it was.
Writer’s Style
We’ve read a lot of Lippman over the years but as boyfriend
Crow became more and more of a “main squeeze,” we veered away from the Tess
books.
However, Lippman has deservedly won all the major crime
story awards in the industry and rightly so. The Green Raincoat opening is magnetic (see above), her writing style
is comfortable, funny in places, and it accelerates - plus the reader learns a
bit about Baltimore (but not enough to want to visit, taking after our
president).
I would suggest you read this book rather quickly since
there are a lot of characters at least mentioned that you might only recall by
name time after time. In addition, though we loved a shorter Lippman, we felt
it accelerated too quickly to the climax – and the after-climax may be lost on
all but the die-hard fans. In other words, the book could have been even
shorter.
All in All
Welcome "back," Tess!
*Graduate of Wilde Lake High School, Columbia, MD where I
would have attended
**a Doberman Pinscher, a Greyhound, and a (small) Italian
Greyhound
Caveat: Although DogEvals purchased The Girl in the Green Raincoat from the wonderful used book store next to the DMV on Dobbin in Columbia, MD, it is also available at the Howard County, MD, public libraries.
Caveat: Although DogEvals purchased The Girl in the Green Raincoat from the wonderful used book store next to the DMV on Dobbin in Columbia, MD, it is also available at the Howard County, MD, public libraries.
ReplyDeleteAwesome
dogs blog here!
Thanks for the good info.well searched!
ReplyDeleteDogsNStuff.net