Laura Lippman, What the Dead Know

What the Dead Know

Laura Lippman

Morrow, Mar 2007, $24.95

ISBN 0061128856

In Baltimore County, Maryland, the Valiant skids on the icy oil slick nudging an SUV that flips down an embankment. The Valiant driver fails to stop until she is away from the accident scene with her car suffering front fender damage. She pulls onto the shoulder and begins walking from her automobile with her ribs hurting her. A patrolman stops her and reads her rights to her for leaving the scene of an accident. She claims to be one of the Bethany girls, but realizes he is too young to know what that revelation means.

Her claim, with no substantiation, cannot be ignored by the police, so Detective Kevin Infante, due to missing roll call, is assigned to investigate whether she is a wacko as expected. The two Bethany sisters, fifteen-year-old Sunny and twelve-year-old Heather, vanished three decades ago without a trace while going to a mall. Her story has some validity and a ring of plausibility to it, but also lacks key details though she swears Sunny's neck was broken in front of her. Kevin knows he must make further inquires because she asserts her sibling was murdered back in 1975.

WHAT THE DEAD KNOW is a superb police procedural that effortlessly moves back and forth between the present and 1975. This enables the audience to obtain a variety of perspectives of what happened to the Bethany sisters when they vanished and compare that with the way "Heather" thinks and behaves today. The investigation is top rate, but this stand-alone mystery (no Tess Monaghan) belongs to the claimant as the audience will want to know if she is the real deal, a nut case or a fake trying to avoid the car accident. The climax is superbly perceived with clues throughout leading to a reasonable conclusion to a great thriller.

Harriet Klausner