nomadreader

The backstory: I really enjoy mysteries, and when I read my first Laura Lippman novel last year, Life Sentences ( my review ), I didn't really love it because I didn't think it was much of a mystery. I did think she was a good writer, though, and when I heard about her latest stand-alone mystery, I'd Know You Anywhere, I wanted to give her another try.   The basics: When Eliza was fifteen, she was kidnapped and held captive for weeks by a man who raped and killed young women. He let her go. He's now on death row, and she receives a letter from him that shatters her present world. She changed her name from Elizabeth to Eliza, took her husband's name and never speaks of the event. My thoughts: Once again, I read a Lippman novel I wouldn't describe as a mystery. The central mystery, if you can call it that, is the lingering effect of kidnapping. The novel is told in alternating chapters of the summer of 1985, Elizabeth's summer with Walter, and the pre...

I featured this book in my mailbox delight column on March 11, 2009. Here's how the publisher describes this novel: Author Cassandra Fallows has achieved remarkable success by baring her life on the page. Her two widely popular memoirs continue to sell briskly, acclaimed for their brutal, unexpurgated candor about friends, family, lovers—and herself. But now, after a singularly unsuccessful stab at fiction, Cassandra believes she may have found the story that will enable her triumphant return to nonfiction. When Cassandra was a girl, growing up in a racially diverse middle-class neighborhood in Baltimore, her best friends were all black: elegant, privileged Donna; sharp, shrewd Tisha; wild and worldly Fatima. A fifth girl orbited their world—a shy, quiet, unobtrusive child named Calliope Jenkins—who, years later, would be accused of killing her infant son. Yet the boy's body was never found and Calliope's unrelenting silence on the subject forced a judge to jail her fo...