Laura Lippman

PI Tess Monaghan knows and loves every inch of her native Baltimore. It's a quirky city where baseball reigns, but lately homicide seems to be the second most popular sport. Business tycoon Wink Wynkowski is trying to change all that by bringing pro basketball to town-until a devastating exposé appears in the Baltimore Beacon Light. The newspaper's editors thought they'd killed the piece. Instead, the piece killed Wink, who's found dead in his garage....

First as a reporter and then as a PI, Tess Monaghan has learned how to survive and thrive on the streets of Baltimore. But a new case will force her to confront her own past, and a man she loved and lost. It starts when she gets a newspaper photograph of her old boyfriend with a tantalizing shard of headline attached: In Big Trouble. The answers lie far from Baltimore, deep in a world of good-time music, old-fashioned ambition, and rich people's games....

Tess Monaghan has finally made the move and hung out her shingle as a PI-for-hire, complete with an office in Butchers Hill. Maybe it}s not the best address in Baltimore, but you gotta start somewhere, and Tess' greyhound Esskay has no trouble taking marathon naps anywhere there's a roof. Then in walks Luther Beale, the notorious vigilante who five years ago shot a boy for vandalizing his car. Just out of prison, he says he wants to make reparations...

New York Times bestselling author Laura Lippman has been hailed as one of the best crime fiction writers in America today, winning virtually every major award in the genre. The author of the enormously popular series featuring Baltimore P.I. Tess Monaghan as well as three critically lauded stand-alone novels, Lippman now turns her attention to short stories-and reveals another level of mastery. Lippman sets many of the stories in this sterling anthology,...

Collects the author's recent essays exploring motherhood as an older mom, her life as a reader, her relationships with her parents, her newspaper career, and her experiences as a novelist.

For Tess Monaghan, the unsolved murder of a young federal prosecutor is nothing more than a theoretical problem, one of several cases to be deconstructed in her new gig as a consultant to the local newspaper. But then her boyfriend brings home a street kid who doesn't even realize he holds an important key to the man's death. Tess agrees to protect the boy's identity no matter what, especially when one of his friends is killed in an apparent case...

It is a Charm City tradition -- an annual visit to the Baltimore gravesite of Edgar Allan Poe on the renowned author's birthday by a mysterious cloaked figure bearing gifts of three roses and a half bottle of cognac. This year Tess Monaghan witnesses the cherished rite and sees two caped visitors. One leaves his tribute and escapes, the other dies there, felled by an assassin's bullet. Someone wants Tess involved in the murder investigation and leaves...

When the production of a Hollywood film in Baltimore brings mayhem and murder to the area, private investigator Tess Monaghan finds her job complicated by the acting skills of her numerous suspects.

Once the best of friends until a terrible secret tore them apart, a group of friends are suddenly brought back together under tragic circumstances and wonder if their long-ago lie is the reason for their troubles today and if someone is out to destroy them.

On a searing August day, Melisandre Harris Dawes committed the unthinkable: she left her two-month-old daughter locked in a car while she sat nearby on the shores of the Patapsco River. Melisandre was found not guilty by reason of criminal insanity, although there was much skepticism about her mental state. Freed, she left the country, her husband and her two surviving children, determined to start over. But now Melisandre has returned to Baltimore...