The Girl in the Green Raincoat (Tess Monaghan Series #11)

by Laura Lippman

Overview

In the third trimester of her pregnancy, Baltimore private investigator Tess Monaghan is under doctor's orders to remain immobile. Bored and restless, reduced to watching the world go by outside her window, she takes small comfort in the mundane events she observes . . . like the young woman in a green raincoat who walks her dog at the same time every day. Then one day the dog is running free and its owner is nowhere to be seen. Certain that something is terribly wrong, and incapable of leaving well enough alone, Tess is determined to get to the bottom of the dog walker's abrupt disappearance, even if she must do so from her own bedroom. But her inquisitiveness is about to fling open a dangerous Pandora's box of past crimes and troubling deaths . . . and she's not only putting her own life in jeopardy but also her unborn child's.

Previously serialized in the New York Times, and now published in book form for the very first time, The Girl in the Green Raincoat is a masterful Hitchcockian thriller from one of the very best in the business: multiple award-winner Laura Lippman.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061938368
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	01/18/2011
Series:	Tess Monaghan Series , #11
Pages:	158
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Laura Lippman has been awarded every major prize in crime fiction. The recipient of the first Mayor's Prize, she lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and New Orleans, Louisiana, with her husband, David Simon, and their family.

Hometown:

Baltimore, Maryland

Date of Birth:

January 31, 1959

Place of Birth:

Atlanta, Georgia

Education:

B.S., Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, 1981

Editorial Reviews

Big changes come in small packages for a Baltimore private eye sidelined by an unplanned pregnancy.

Tess Monaghan (I'd Know You Anywhere, 2010, etc.) never anticipated being pregnant, much less being confined to bed rest by pre-eclampsia. But as she sits on her sun porch wondering whether her maternal instincts will ever kick in, her appetite for sleuthing continues full blast. She sees a young woman and a dog clad in matching fashion-forward green slickers walking in Stony Run. After several days, the woman disappears, and her abandoned Italian greyhound is leaving messes in Tess's living room. Tess traces the dog's owner, Don Epstein, who first says his wife is away on business, but later confesses that Carole just up and left him. Not that Epstein's track record with women is anything to write home about: His first wife Mary was shot in an attempted carjacking, and his second wife Annette died of a hospital-contracted staph infection. In between Mary and Annette, Epstein's girlfriend, Danielle Messinger, broke her neck falling down a flight of stairs—an accident Carole Epstein knows about full well, since Danielle was Carole's sister. With a nod to Hitchcock's Rear Window, Tess uses her confinement as an excuse to exercise her ingenuity in trying to prove that a self-proclaimed abandoned husband is really a cold-blooded killer.

Lippman's slender tale, serialized previously in theNew York Times Magazine, brings back her feisty star detective at her most belligerent, most vulnerable and perhaps most appealing.

Kirkus Reviews