Review by New York Times Review
As she managed to do so well in her first novel, "Black Water Rising," Locke draws on the past to remind her characters how much it has shaped their identities and how much it continues to shape the choices they make. The de facto historian at Belle Vie is Caren Gray, who grew up there as the daughter of a plantation cook and has been this tourist attraction's general manager ever since she and her 9-year-old daughter left New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Although Caren is almost frighteningly self-possessed, her sang-froid is shaken when she stumbles over the body of a murdered migrant worker employed by the giant sugarcane operation adjacent to Belle Vie. The police are quick to suspect Donovan Isaacs, a member of the troupe of actors who perform a scripted re-enactment of the plantation's role in the Civil War. In coming to Donovan's defense, Caren is startled to discover that this young firebrand - entrusted with such deathless dialogue as: "Dem Yankee whites can't make me leave dis here land. Dis here mah home. Freedom weren't meant nothing without Belle Vie" - recently quit school to film his own corrective version of local history. For a character so smart and so appealing, Caren is astonishingly dense about a lot of things that are going on behind her back. Even more astounding is her disinclination to follow up on the shocking revelations that bring the mystery to a close. But if the schematic plot and dangling resolution speak badly for Locke's construction values, the language of her storytelling is sturdy and absorbing. Who can resist the opening scene of a wedding in which a cottonmouth "measuring the length of a Cadillac" falls from a live oak into the lap of the bride's future mother-in-law, then is brushed away with the observation that "it only briefly stopped the ceremony, this being Louisiana after all." Scandinavian sadism, which took a nose dive after the untimely death of Stieg Larsson, perked up when the Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen muscled onto the scene with "The Keeper of Lost Causes," which devised a special cold-case division called Department Q for a maverick homicide cop named Carl Morck. Although relegated to the basement and presented with a Syrian maintenance man as an assistant, Morck managed to find a female politician who had been kept captive and starved for five years. Morck and his colleague, Assad, are still in the basement in THE ABSENT ONE (Dutton, $26.95), but they've been joined by Rose Knudsen, a gifted researcher who never made it out of the police academy but proves invaluable on an investigation involving a group of Copenhagen millionaires who get erotic thrills from tracking and killing exotic animals. Adler-Olsen may lack Larsson's political passion, but he brings great inventiveness to descriptions of the techniques of torture, which keeps the sadistic brutality from becoming repetitive or even (God help us) dull. There's nothing shameful about love, so no reader should feel embarrassed about mourning the loss of a beloved sleuth like Marshal Guarnaccia, the kindly detective who figured in the Florentine mysteries of Magdalen Nabb, who died in 2007. But Florence is still in good hands, entrusted to a private investigator named Sandro Cellini, who keeps a wary eye on the ancient city in a string of mysteries by Christobel Kent. It took me a while to catch up with the "impatient, irascible, impetuous" Cellini, who is more temperamentally akin to Aurelio Zen, the detective in Michael Dibdin's politically charged mysteries. THE DEAD SEASON (Pegasus, $25.95) isn't the first book in this series, but it's a terrific introduction to the intractable problems of a modern-day city plagued by illegal immigrants, an exhausted economy and a broken system of government. Call them what she will, Laura Lippman's out-of-series "mysteries" tend to be extended character studies of interesting women caught up in unusual circumstances that can get a little dicey without posing a convincing threat to life, limb or personal happiness. AND WHEN SHE WAS GOOD (Morrow/HarperCollins, $26.99) runs true to form, but as usual, the circumstances are so extraordinary that the absence of tension tends to be forgotten - if not forgiven. Heloise Lewis, the heroine of Lippman's latest nota-mystery, is a single mother with an 11-year-old son who keeps an extremely low profile in her suburban Maryland community. She calls herself a "socially progressive libertarian," lobbies on behalf of underemployed women and belongs to an unorthodox, and highly entertaining, church. But behind the scenes, Heloise is actually the madam of a high-priced call girl operation that requires an authorial struggle to turn into something capable of attracting a serious criminal element. Without taking away from the nice character profiling, Lippman's effort falls flatter than Heloise's attempt to play at being a soccer mom. Attica Locke's mystery opens with a snake falling into the lap of the brides future mother-in-law.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 7, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Readers first met Heloise, a brainy madam with class, in award-winning crime writer Lippman's stellar short story collection, Hardly Knew Her (2008). In her eighteenth book, Lippman deepens her distinctively ironic and caring inquiry into the hypocrisy and sleaze of Baltimore and the endless array of oppressive and violent acts against women that take place the world over. Heloise runs an airtight operation with a devilishly clever cover, a fail-safe filing-shredding system, and a firewall around her son, who believes that his father is dead, although Heloise's tyrannical and murderous former lover and pimp is in prison instead. Lippman maps the path of abuse and betrayal that turns an honor student into a prostitute who risks her life to sneak off to the library and finally liberates herself. Vigilant Heloise feels reasonably secure until she reads the headline Suburban Madam Dead in Apparent Suicide, the start of harrowing disclosures that put everything she's worked so hard to achieve in danger. Lippman, so smart, clear-sighted, and polished and yet so intense and furious, surveys the intersection of perpetual misogyny and the criminality of sex work in this psychologically astute, diabolically witty, intricately suspenseful, and stylishly righteous tale of atrocities and revenge. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A full-powered national publicity campaign, including an author tour and major online appearances, will whip up big enthusiasm for the much-admired Lippman's latest superb novel.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The consequences of long-buried secrets involving misogyny, motherhood, and morality play out in this excellent stand-alone set in suburban Maryland from Edgar-winner Lippman (The Most Dangerous Thing). Introduced in the novella "Scratch a Woman," Heloise Lewis is a survivor who rose from the ashes of her past to run a profitable call-girl service, occasionally meeting special clients herself. To her neighbors, she's a young widow and a devoted mother who never misses her son Scott's ball games at his middle school. To the IRS, she's a lobbyist with several women on her payroll and a medical plan. But Heloise's carefully constructed life is falling apart because Val Deluca, her son's father, who also was her former pimp, may be released from prison. Val doesn't know he's Scott's father or that Heloise's betrayal put him behind bars for murder. Shifting smoothly from Heloise's past to her present, Lippman delivers an intense character study about a strong, complex woman whose love for her son compels her to make some desperate choices. Agent: Vicky Bijur, Vicky Bijur Literary. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Heloise is a suburban single mother who runs her own business, keeping the needs of her employees and her young son balanced on a knife's edge. She's also a former prostitute whose "consulting" business is actually an escort service with a client roster that includes politicians, lawyers, and other powerful men in Baltimore, Annapolis, and Washington, DC. Heloise has kept her life carefully compartmentalized for years, but those lines start to waver and disappear, beginning with the apparent suicide of another local madam. The police officer who's acted as her protector leaves the department, the accountant who used to turn a blind eye starts asking uncomfortable questions, a pal from the old days tries to blackmail her, and a former employee threatens to sue over the HIV she contracted while in Heloise's employ. Worst of all, though, the most dangerous, violent man from her past may soon be released from prison and looking for revenge. -VERDICT Lippman's (I'd Know You Anywhere) recent novels have skirted the line between mysteries and mainstream fiction, and this one is no different. While the author slowly ratchets up the tension until the final, blood-drenched showdown, this is really a story about a woman wresting control of her life from the men who done her wrong and then using her considerable resources to defend what she's built. It's a page-turner, but often an uncomfortable one, as enough of Heloise's backstory is included for readers to understand some of her more unsavory decisions. What may seem like a dropped plot point concerning her stepsister, Meghan, is actually a callback to a connected novella, "Scratch a Woman," which appears in the 2008 collection Hardly Knew Her, but the novel easily can be enjoyed on its own.-Stephanie Klose, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Lippman (The Most Dangerous Thing, 2011, etc.), who specializes in tales of feckless parents and their luckless kids, puts a madam at the center of her latest dysfunctional family. At first, nothing could be more conventional than the Lewis family saga. Helen's father, already married with two children to his credit, knocks up her mother, Beth, a 19-year-old carhop. He moves in with Beth but hangs around his ex-wife Barbara enough to give Helen a half sister, Meghan, only six months younger. As Beth and Barbara tussle over worthless Hector, he focuses on tormenting Helen, telling her that she has "a nothing face," breaking her record albums and forcing her to get a job that interferes with her schoolwork. It's while waitressing at Il Cielo that she meets Billy, the owner's stepson, who lures her to Baltimore with promises of marriage. Instead, he turns her out, making her earn money to feed his drug habit by doing lap dances at a local strip club. That's where she meets Val Deluca, whose red hair matches his fiery temper. Val offers Helen a nice house and a better class of client, all for doing what she's already doing. He also gives her the chance to be something she'd never dreamed of: a mother. That's when Helen's tale goes off the beaten path. Before he learns about Helen's delicate condition, Val is jailed for murder, and Helen reinvents herself as Heloise Lewis, running the business at a level Val had never achieved. She recruits college girls with delicately worded ads for escorts and serves clients who include state legislators, all while presenting herself as a lobbyist for the Women's Full Employment Network. But when another suburban madam turns up dead, Heloise realizes that the safe, comfortable life she's crafted for herself and her beloved son, Scott, in affluent Turner's Grove is at risk. Like Mary Cassatt, Lippman studies families with a different eye than her male contemporaries, showing the heartbreaking complexity of life with those you love.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
