What the Dead Know (Lippman)

What the Dead Know
Laura Lippman, 2007
HarperCollins
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061128868

Summary
Thirty years ago two sisters disappeared from a shopping mall. Their bodies were never found and those familiar with the case have always been tortured by these questions: How do you kidnap two girls? Who—or what—could have lured the two sisters away from a busy mall on a Saturday afternoon without leaving behind a single clue or witness?

Now a clearly disoriented woman involved in a rush-hour hit-and-run claims to be the younger of the long-gone Bethany sisters. But her involuntary admission and subsequent attempt to stonewall investigators only deepens the mystery. Where has she been? Why has she waited so long to come forward? Could her abductor truly be a beloved Baltimore cop? There isn't a shred of evidence to support her story, and every lead she gives the police seems to be another dead end-a dying, incoherent man, a razed house, a missing grave, and a family that disintegrated long ago, torn apart not only by the crime but by the fissures the tragedy revealed in what appeared to be the perfect household.

In a story that moves back and forth across the decades, there is only one person who dares to be skeptical of a woman who wants to claim the identity of one Bethany sister without revealing the fate of the other. Will he be able to discover the truth? (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—January 31. 1959
• Where—Atlanta, Georgia, USA
• Raised—Baltimore, Maryland
• Education—B.S., Northwestern University
• Awards—Edgar and Shamus awards for Charm City, 1997;
   Agatha and Anthony awards for Butchers Hill, 1998;
   Anthony and Shamus awards for Big Trouble, 1999
• Currently—lives in Baltimore, Maryland

Lippman was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the daughter of Theo Lippman Jr., a well known and respected writer at the Baltimore Sun, and Madeline Lippman, a retired school librarian for the Baltimore City Public School System. She attended high school in Columbia, Maryland, where she was the captain of the Wilde Lake High School It's Academic team.

Lippman is a former reporter for the (now defunct) San Antonio Light and the Baltimore Sun. She is best known for writing a series of novels set in Baltimore and featuring Tess Monaghan, a reporter (like Lippman herself) turned private investigator. Lippman's works have won the Agatha, Anthony, Edgar, Nero, Gumshoe and Shamus awards. Her 2007 release, What the Dead Know, was the first of her books to make the New York Times bestseller list, and was shortlisted for the Crime Writer's Association Dagger Award. In addition to the Tess Monaghan novels, Lippman wrote 2003's Every Secret Thing, which has been optioned for the movies by Academy Award–winning actor Frances McDormand.

Lippman lives in the South Baltimore neighborhood of Federal Hill and frequently writes in the neighborhood coffee shop Spoons. In addition to writing, she teaches at Goucher College in Towson, Maryland, just outside of Baltimore. In January, 2007, she taught at the 3rd Annual Writers in Paradise at Eckerd College.

Lippman is married to David Simon, another former Baltimore Sun reporter, and creator and an executive producer of the HBO series The Wire. The character Bunk is shown to be reading one of her books in episode eight of the first season of The Wire. She appeared in a scene of the first episode of the last season of The Wire as a reporter working in the Baltimore Sun newsroom. (From Wikipedia.)

Extras
Excerpts from a 2003 Barnes & Noble interview:

• I can do an imitation of Ethel Merman singing "Satisfaction."

• Like my character, Tess Monaghan, I used to row. Unlike her, I was very, very bad at it.

• I've written eight books in my series—one not yet published —and a stand-alone crime novel, but my subject is always, on some level, Baltimore.... It's a problem-place, neither northern nor southern, somewhat addicted to nostalgia, yet amnesiac about the more dicey parts of its past. I used an epigraph from H. L. Mencken in one of my books: "A Baltimorean is not merely John Doe, an isolated individual of Homo sapiens, like every other John Doe. He is a John Doe of a certain place—of Baltimore, of a definite home in Baltimore." I am a person of a certain place, and that place happens to be Baltimore.

• When asked what book most influenced her career as a writer, she answered:

It wasn't so much a book as a single line in a book—the last line of Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings. She writes: "A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within."

I, too, had led a fairly sheltered life at the time I read this. But Welty's words persuaded me that this was an obstacle that could be overcome; if I worked hard to develop my empathy and curiosity, then no world, no topic would be off-limits to me. Yes, writers should write what they know about—but knowledge need not end with autobiography. All I had to do was venture out into the world and see things. My newspaper career provided just the window on the world I needed.

Welty, by the way, worked as a photographer as part of a WPA project in the 1930s. That's not mentioned in her memoir, but the detail seems relevant to me. (Author interview from Barnes & Noble.)

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Book Reviews
What the Dead Know, like the best books in this tradition, is doubly satisfying. You read it once just to move breathlessly toward the finale. Then you revisit it to marvel at how well Ms. Lippman pulled the wool over your eyes.
Janet Maslin - New York Times


As artful as she is at interweaving disarming scenes of two spirited girls on the day they vanished with painful moments in the lives of their parents—maintaining all the while a thread of continuity in the current-day police investigation—Lippman pulls off something more ambitious than a high-wire act of technical virtuosity. With great thought and compassion, she uses her fractured narrative style to delve into the ways in which every serious crime tears to shreds the lives of its victims
Marilyn Stasio - New York Times


If you only know her from her Tess Monaghan series, or if you don't know her work at all, read What the Dead Know. It's an all but flawless performance by a writer at the peak of her powers.
Patrick Anderson - Washington Post


Emond sounds more than a little like Laura Linney, and her plainspoken, occasionally whispery reading of Lippman's disturbing novel of buried secrets often brings the acclaimed actress to mind. Lippman's novel shuttles back and forth between the present, where a middle-aged woman is involved in a hit-and-run accident, and a past in which two girls are abducted from a mall and never seen again. Do the two events have anything to do with each other? Emond brings a sense of quiet force to Lippman's story, her voice imprinted with sadness and a sense of life's tragic surprises. Her reading bridges the unbridgeable gaps between past and present in Lippman's story, offering little in the way of surprises but a marked amount of suppressed, nearly palpable emotion.
Publishers Weekly


A woman is found disoriented and wandering the street after a hit-and-run accident. Although the accident is not that serious, police are intrigued by the woman's reluctance to provide identification and her claim to be one of a pair of sisters abducted from a shopping mall 30 years earlier. Following her statement, the woman clams up. No bodies were ever found, and many who worked on the missing sisters' case—including the girls' father—are dead or terminally ill. The story moves back and forth through time with suspenseful pacing as the listener gradually begins to understand the terrible consequences of this event. When the girls' mother is finally located, the dramatic suspense is breathtaking and leads to a finale that is completely plausible and satisfying. Linda Emond gives a wonderful performance, using different voices and accents to bring immediacy to the many characters and circumstances. Her pacing adds to the mystery and never leaves the listener in doubt as to the time frame and setting. Anyone who ever questioned why Lippman has won every major crime fiction prize will stop wondering after hearing this wonderful production. Highly recommended for adult and teen collections.
Barbara Valle - Library Journal

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Discussion Questions
1. Laura Lippman withholds a lot of information in the early going of the book. Is that a cheat, or true to the way the characters would have approached the information?

2. Lippman actually used historically accurate details in the book—Escape to Witch Mountain and Chinatown, for example, were the films at that movie theater at that time, and the story about the freak blizzard in '66, the rise of the home answering machine in the 1980s. But do those details add something above and beyond historical accuracy?

3. Who in this book could be described as evil, if anyone? On the morning in March that all these people's destinies collide and interlock—who's really at fault, if anyone?

4. Is Miriam a "bad" woman? Does she see herself as bad and believe that she is being punished for her misdeeds? How does Lippman want us to regard Stan Dunham—as Miriam does, or as Sunny does, or somewhere in-between?

5. What is Kay's role in the book? Is there any significance to the fact that she's reading Jane Eyre?

6. Why are Dave and Miriam so restless in the days before their daughters disappear? What are they wistful for? What do they regret?

7. Dave and Miriam choose very different ways of mourning their daughters. Dave enshrines the memory, choosing to vary almost nothing about his life, while Miriam flees, ultimately choosing to live in a place where no one can possibly know about the tragedy. Is Lippman suggesting that one way of mourning is more valid than the other? Is Dave's misery proof that he's made a mistake, or simply evidence of his own conflicted nature?

8. The five-fold path, which Dave practices, includes self-knowledge as its ultimate goal. Who in What the Dead Know attains self-knowledge? Who never quite gets there? Does self-knowledge necessarily involve change, or can one find peace even in a flawed self?

9. At one point, Nancy Porter notes that "Heather Bethany's" story is least convincing when it's at its most lurid. The ultimate fate of the Bethany girls turns out to be almost banal, a series of mistakes and accidents that led to a tragedy no one planned. Is the fate of the Bethany girls more or less disturbing as a result? Does it seem like something that really could happen?

10. The last line of the first chapter dwells on how freeing it is to say one's name (p. 10). The last line of the book says one's name is the most important word that anyone can ever hear (p. 373). The missing Bethany girl has had a number of names throughout her life and even her mother, Miriam, has availed herself of a slight name change, reverting to her maiden name, which feels like a new name because it's pronounced differently in Spanish. Do names matter so much? Why? How do our names shape our destinies?

11. At the end of the book, Kevin Infante reflects that the missing Bethany girl has always been out in the open, the kind of woman that other people observe, but don't truly see—a student, a store clerk, a support person in the office. What is Lippman trying to say about certain women in our culture? Who is it that we don't see, who fails to register in our day-to-day lives?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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