Лучшие книги Лауры Липман

Книга и тайна, книга и преступление — истории, вошедшие в этот сборник, связывает книжная тема. Вы узнаете о незваном госте, явившемся к Зигмунду Фрейду, о том, как знаменитый Коломбо разоблачил убийцу из книжного магазина, как любовь к книге сгубила главу мексиканского наркокартеля и как Лондонская библиотека оказалась хранилищем смертельно опасных тайн... В эту антологию, составленную по инициативе Отто Пенцлера, лауреата премий «Эдгар», «Эллери Куин» и «Ворон» за вклад в развитие и пропаганду детективного направления в литературе, вошли оригинальные работы известных мастеров остросюжетного жанра. Среди авторов и такие «крутые» авторы…

Балтимор, штат Мэриленд, 1966 год.

37-летняя Мэдди Шварц еще в прошлом году была обеспеченной и счастливой женой, матерью, домохозяйкой. В нынешнем она – одиночка на побегушках в газете "Стар". Мэдди решила отказаться от почти двадцатилетнего брака и реализовать свои мечты, наполнить жизнь смыслом.

26-летняя Клео Шервуд была убита полгода назад, а тело нашли только сейчас. Но судьба негритянки никого не волновала и не волнует, кроме ее семьи. И кроме Шварц. В этой трагической истории начинающая газетчица увидела возможность пробиться на новом поприще – и уцепилась за нее.

Совершенно не подозревая, чем это может обернуться…

Однажды две сестры-подростка, Санни и Хизер, не вернулись домой. Исчезли без следа. Долгие годы их безуспешно разыскивала полиция, и даже родители девочек уже перестали надеяться вновь увидеть своих дочерей… И вот, спустя тридцать лет, в полицию попала женщина, сделавшая сенсационное признание: она – Хизер, одна из пропавших много лет назад сестер. В участок на опознание срочно приехала ее мать. И тут начались странности. Арестованная рассказала о таких деталях детства двух сестер, которые, казалось, давно должна была забыть, а вот действительно важные вещи не помнила напрочь… Хизер ли это? А если нет – то кто она и зачем выдает себя за…

Талантливый репортер Тесс Моноган становится невольным свидетелем убийства своего бывшего однокурсника. Проводя частное расследование, она остро чувствует грозящую ей опасность. Мастерство автора - американской писательницы Лауры Липман, сумевшей передать напряжение стремительно развивающихся событий романа, не оставит равнодушными любителей детективного жанра.

Роман "Чарующий город" продолжает рассказ о приключениях отчаянной Тесс Монаган - бывшей журналистки, а ныне сотрудницы частного детективного агентства. Ее жизнь не назовешь скучной - она полна неожиданных событий, а порой и опасностей.

Тесс Монаган наконец определилась со своим призванием в жизни и обрела столь желанную стабильность. Хотя как сказать: работает она частным детективом, а это занятие подразумевает постоянный риск и множество неприятных сюрпризов. Вот и очередной из них – странное письмо из Техаса, сообщающее, что ее давний возлюбленный, эксцентричный музыкант по прозвищу Ворон, ""в большой беде"". Очень похоже на злую шутку, но куда в таком случае он исчез? И что значит его послание, похожее на те, что писали когда-то на своих дверях люди, бежавшие от закона?.. Особенности «DETECTED. Тайна, покорившая мир» - это современные триллеры и детективы, иногда с…

"Девять пуль для тени" - классический американский детектив с захватывающим сюжетом и глубоким проникновением во внутреннюю жизнь героев. Яркие зарисовки криминального мира Америки, девять загадочных преступлений, повествование от лица убийцы - все это доставит настоящее удовольствие любителям детективного жанра.

Роман Every Secret Thing писательницы Лоры Липпман, съемки которого должны начаться уже в марте, рассказывает читателю о двух одинадцатилетних девочках, обвиняемых в смерти ребенка. Девочек сажают под арест, но в восемнадцать лет они выходят на свободу, и в городе начинается новая волна убийств детей. Героини становятся главными подозреваемыми и сейчас им нужно не только доказать свою невиновность, но и раскрыть тайну первого убийства.

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, the grouchy owner, is more than the pressures of running a small business. Each Saturday, someone steals a stack of her priciest, most beautiful children’s books, and the expense threatens to force…

An African-American man accused of rape by a humiliated girl. A vengeful father. A courageous attorney. A worshipful daughter. Think you know this story? Think again.

Laura Lippman, the “extravagantly gifted” (Chicago Tribune) New York Times bestselling author, delivers “one of her best novels ” (Washington Post)—a modern twist on To Kill a Mockingbird. Scott Turow writes in the New York Times, “Wilde Lake is a real success.”

Luisa “Lu” Brant is the newly elected state’s attorney representing suburban Maryland—including the famous planned community of Columbia, created to be a utopia of racial and economic equality. Prosecuting a controversial case involving a disturbed drifter accused of beating a woman to death, the fiercely ambitious Lu is determined to avoid the traps that have destroyed other competitive, successful women. She’s going to play it smart to win this case—and win big—cementing her political future.

But her intensive preparation for trial unexpectedly dredges up painful recollections of another crime—the night when her brother, AJ, saved his best friend at the cost of another man’s life. Only eighteen, AJ was cleared by a grand jury. Justice was done. Or was it? Did the events of 1980 happen as she remembers them? She was only a child then. What details didn’t she know?

As she plunges deeper into the past, Lu is forced to face a troubling reality. The legal system, the bedrock of her entire life, does not have all the answers. But what happens when she realizes that, for the first time, she doesn’t want to know the whole truth?

"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.

In the end, has anyone really led a blameless life?

Injured in a freak fall, novelist Gerry Andersen is confined to a hospital bed in his glamorous high-rise apartment, dependent on two women he barely knows: his incurious young assistant, and a dull, slow-witted night nurse.

Then late one night, the phone rings. The caller claims to be the “real” Aubrey, the alluring title character from his most successful novel, Dream Girl. But there is no real Aubrey. She’s a figment born of a writer’s imagination, despite what many believe or claim to know. 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 a dreamlike state in which he is haunted by his own past: his faithless father, his devoted mother; the women who loved him, the women he loved.

And now here is Aubrey, threatening to visit him, suggesting that she is owed something. Is the threat real or is it a sign of dementia? Which scenario would he prefer? Gerry has never been so alone, so confused – and so terrified.

Chilling and compulsively readable, touching on timely issues that include power, agency, appropriation, and creation, Dream Girl is a superb blend of psychological suspense and horror that reveals the mind and soul of a writer.

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?

The California dream weavers have invaded Charm City with their cameras, their stars, and their controversy. . . .

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/babysitter. Tumulty's concern may be well founded. Not long ago a Baltimore man was discovered dead in his own home, surrounded by photos of the beautiful, difficult superstar-in-the-making.

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--even with the help of Tess's icily unflappable friend Whitney--since Selene is not as naive as everyone seems to think, and far more devious than she initially appears to be. This is not Tess's world. And these are not her kind of people, with their vanities, their self-serving agendas and invented personas, and their remarkably skewed visions of reality--from the series' aging, shallow, former pretty-boy leading man to its resentful, always-on-the-make cowriter to the officious young assistant who may be too hungry for her own good.

But the fish-out-of-water P.I. is abruptly pulled back in by an occurrence she's all too familiar with--murder. Suddenly the wall of secrets around "Mann of Steel" is in danger of toppling, leaving shattered dreams, careers, and lives scattered among the ruins--a catastrophe that threatens the people Tess cares about . . . and the city she loves.

After finishing a shift volunteering at an inner-city soup kitchen, Ransome finds one of his car tires slashed and meets smooth-talking con man Lloyd Jupiter, who offers to help fix the flat for a nominal fee. Instead of calling the police on the 16-year-old scam artist, Ransome does the unthinkable and brings Jupiter back to his home, where he feeds him and offers him a bed for the night. When Tess returns home, she and Ransome discover that Jupiter may have information concerning an unsolved case involving the brutal murder of a federal prosecutor months earlier. After vowing not to reveal Jupiter's identity, Tess gives the local…

Частный детектив Тесс Монаган вновь принимается за дело. Ее клиентом становится бывший заключенный Лютер Бил, прозванный журналистами Мясником из Батчерз-Хиллз. Он был осужден за убийство одиннадцатилетнего мальчика.

Near the start of this outstanding novel of psychological suspense from Edgar-winner Lippman (Life Sentences), Eliza Benedict, a 38-year-old married mother of two living in suburban Maryland, receives a letter from Walter Bowman, the man who kidnapped her the summer she was 15 and is now on death row. The narrative shifts between the present and that long ago summer, when Eliza involuntarily became a part of Walter's endless road trip, including the fateful night when he picked up another teenage girl, Holly Tackett. Soon after Walter killed Holly, Eliza was rescued and taken home. Eliza must now balance a need for closure with a desire to protect herself emotionally. Walter wants something specific from her, but she has no idea what, and she's not sure that she wants to know. All the relationships, from the sometimes contentious one between Eliza and her sister, Vonnie, to the significantly stranger one between Walter and Barbara LaFortuny, an advocate for prisoners, provide depth and breadth to this absorbing story.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Sunburn, and soon to be a major AppleTV series starring Natalie Portman and Lupita Nyongo
Cleo Sherwood disappeared eight months ago. Aside from her parents and the two sons she left behind, no one seems to have noticed. It isnt hard to understand why: its 1964 and neither the police, the public nor the papers care much when Negro women go missing.
Maddie Schwartz - recently separated from her husband, working her first job as an assistant at the Baltimore Sun - wants one thing: a byline. When she hears about an unidentified body thats been pulled out of the fountain in Druid Hill Park, Maddie thinks she is about to uncover a story that will finally get her name in print. What she cant imagine is how much trouble she will cause by chasing a story that no-one wants her to tell.

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.

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…