Laura Lippman Books

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Author Laura Lippman was born in Atlanta, Georgia but would grow up in Baltimore, Maryland. She is married to David Simon, who used to work as a reporter in Baltimore and created and executive produced the television series “The Wire” for HBO. She and her father, Theo Lippman, Jr., were also reporters. Laura worked as a daily newspaper reporter for a total of twenty years, working twelve of those years at the Baltimore Sun, the same paper that her husband and father worked at. She worked the other eight years as a reporter at other newspapers located in Texas. While working full-time at the Sun, she was writing her novels full time and got seven of them published, but she started to write fiction full time in the year 2001. While in high school that she attended in Columbia, Maryland, she acted in different theater productions, she was captain of the school’s It’s Academic team, and would later graduate from Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism. Lippman comes from Jewish and Scots-Irish ancestry. Her sister is a bookseller, and her mother worked in a library for the public school system in Baltimore. She has lived in Baltimore, Maryland since her return there in the late eighties.

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Laura writes short stories, stand alone novels, and the “Tess Monaghan” series (about a reporter who winds up, by accident, becoming a private investigator) of novels and stories. Her novels are detective fiction, and have found their way onto the New York Times bestseller list. She sets a lot of her novels in Baltimore, Maryland, where she and her husband live together, in the Federal Hill neighborhood. She likes to write her books in a coffee shop near her house called Spoons.

LAURA LIPPMAN AWARDS

Her work has won Anthony, Edgar, Agatha, Shamus, Gumshoe, Nero awards. One of her novels, “What the Dead Know” got shortlisted for a Dagger Award by the Crime Writer’s Association. She has been nominated for other awards as well.

BEST LAURA LIPPMAN BOOKS

If you are interested in reading her novels, here are some that might be a good place to start.

What the Dead Know: The two Bethany girls, aged eleven and fifteen, disappeared from a shopping mall in Baltimore thirty years ago. No one knows what happened to them because of the fact that their bodies were never found and they never came back. After a hit and run accident that occurs during rush hour, a woman who is disoriented is claiming to be the younger sister, Heather Bethany. There is no evidence to back up these claims and her reluctant leads give the police nothing but dead ends. These involve a razed house, an incoherent man who is dying, and a missing grave. One thing is for certain, this woman knows about the day the Bethany girls went missing and she exposes cracks in the supposedly solid foundation of what was supposed to be a happy family.

After I’m Gone: Felix Brewer makes a lot of promises to a woman named Bambi at a Valentine’s Day dance. He is able to keep them, with his businesses (some of which are even legal), and keep her and her three kids in luxury. Her world blows up seventeen years later when he vanishes while facing a prison sentence. Bambi knows not where her husband, or the money, went; she knows someone who might, and her name is Julie, Felix’s mistress. Julie goes missing exactly ten years after Felix does, everyone thinks that she has gone and joined Felix on the lam. Someone works a cold case almost thirty years later with a lot of elements and emotions at play. At the center, is Felix himself, a man who left five women behind; his wife, her three kids, and his mistress. Does one of them know what happened in the cold case?

Wilde Lake: Luisa Brant is the first female State’s Attorney to be elected in Howard County, Maryland. This is a position that her father famously held. She wants to make her name, and sees her chance by trying a drifter with mental disturbances who is accused of beating a woman to death in her home. Not a big deal, but the county does not see many killings. She remembers something that happened involving her brother that has her questioning everything that happened back then. She wonders if she is not remembering the way things happened, and if she was even told the entire story.

When Does The Next Laura Lippman book come out?

Laura Lippman doesn't seem to have an upcoming book. Their newest book is Prom Mom and was released on July, 25th 2023.

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