This is pa
rt of an ongoing series of posts, featuring some of my favorite mystery authors.
Laura Lippman writes a great series of gumshoe detective books set in Baltimore, Maryland. Her detective is Tess Monaghan, a former reporter for the Baltimore Sun turned private investigator. (Interesting note: Lippman herself who was a reporter for the Sun before she started writing novels.) Monaghan has a winning can-do personality and the stories have loads of local flavor, which is one of the reasons I read detective fiction. The west coast may claim such greats as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet, but the east coast has Laura Lippman.
Another interesting note: Lippman married a fellow Baltimore Sun alum: David Simon, the creator and writer of the television shows The Wire, Homicide: Life on the Streets, and Treme (the former two set in Baltimore). Lippman appears on the season 5 premiere of The Wire as a reporter at the Baltimore Sun.
The first book in the Tess Monaghan series that the library owns is The Sugar House. This series is fine to pick up just about anywhere, though if you like these books you will want to circle back to read the earlier novels. Lippman writes frequent stand-alone books that I’d call domestic thrillers. Try And She Was Good or Every Secret Thing.
Don’t forget to leave a comment with your mystery writer picks or, even better, write up a quick recommendation for your fellow readers on our blog!
