No matter the fact that civilization is crumbling and the world is on fire, the one bright spot of these interesting times in which we find ourselves is that this is the Platinum Age of Crime Fiction. There are so many incredibly gifted and talented and amazing writers publishing in this time that I’ll never catch up. There are, however, a few writers that I will always move to the top of the stack once it arrives and I’ve finished the current book I am reading.
For over twenty years, one of those authors has been Laura Lippman.
And this new one? Chef’s kiss.
The lights were off in the bathroom, but the door was ajar and light had begun seeping into the room. The day came at Amber in a series of unpleasant sensations. Hard–she was lying on the floor. Cold–she had on only her strapless bra, the floor was tile, the air conditioning had been set low.
Sticky. That was the blood. So much blood. She didn’t know a body could lose this amount of blood without going into shock. Maybe she was in shock? She had taken a first aid course at the Y and remembered what to do for someone else in shock–get them to lie down, elevate the legs–but no one ever told you how to know if you yourself were in shock. Besides, she was already lying down.
“Joe? Joe?”
No answer. He wasn’t here, of course. Why hadn’t he tried to check on her? Was he so busy mooning over his ex-girlfriend that he couldn’t be bothered to see if Amber was going to rally and make it to the after-party? He must have gone without her–fair enough, given how she had demanded the only room key and bolted from the prom, never to return, but couldn’t he at least pretended concern?
He doesn’t really like you, her mother had said when Amber had told her about the invitation. Not in that way. That’s okay, Amber had replied, and it had been okay, because she believed it was only a matter of time before he realized that he did like her. She had thought it would happen last night.
Thematically, Laura Lippman’s incredible new novel explores the Bryan Stevenson quote, “we are more than the worst thing we have ever done”, and what does it mean and how does it feel to be defined and always characterized by the worst thing you’ve ever done. The “prom mom” of the title is Amber Glass, a lonely but intelligent teenager who is a non-entity at her high school. Amber was a volunteer student tutor, and she worked with golden boy Joe Simpson, whose grades have slipped since his long-time first love girlfriend dumped him for a college guy. Amber is of dazzled by him and falls for him (the book cleverly makes a She’s All That reference here). Her exit from the prom is because she is experiencing cramping and feels sick…and gives birth prematurely in the bathroom. She didn’t know she was pregnant because she was ignorant about her body and its functions, and just thought she was gaining weight. The baby is dead, and Amber becomes known as “prom mom,” and is sentenced for matricide as a juvenile; sealed records and release at eighteen. Joe becomes “cad dad” (not checking on his sick date, and the real reason why is even worse than the tabloids print). Both Joe and Amber are damaged by the events of their prom night, and spend the next twenty-two years trying to get past their past and move on, always terrified that it’s going to come back into the news sometime and wreck their now comfortable existences.
Flash forward twenty-two years to 2019, and Joe is a successful realtor (thanks to some handy nepotism) married to a brilliant plastic surgeon (originally from New Orleans) and they live in a huge beautiful old home–they have no children, by choice (both have their own reasons, and this character building here is incredible) and has a perfect life on the surface. Meredith is very Type-A and rational, she and Joe are each other’s entire world–but Joe is also having a sordid little affair with another, younger realtor, and he is also taking an enormous business risk with their financial security without consulting or even telling her. Both Joe and Meredith are point of view characters in the present; there are occasional flashbacks to how the Joe/Amber dynamic began, how they came to go to the prom together, and how both were very similar beneath the enormous surface differences.
But Amber, our title character, is perhaps one of the most intriguing and interesting characters Lippman has created in her best-selling, critically acclaimed and award-winning career, which is saying something. Lippman has no flaws as an author, only strengths, but one of the things she is capable of that I truly envy is her consummate skill at character, all the incredible little details and touches she gives them that provide so much insight into who they are as people and, no matter how bad the decisions they make or whatever horrible things they may do (or are capable of doing), those little incisively precise details make them relatable and understandable, if unlikable. Meredith seems very cold, for example, yet her own tragic backstory explains who she is and how she became who she is so brilliantly that you can’t help worrying about what may happen when she finds out the things her beloved (and always forgiven husband) is hiding from her.
Yet Amber….Amber is the unabashed center and beating heart of the book. Her backstory, putting her life back together and keeping her past hidden, takes her many places before she lands in New Orleans (oh, my heart); and her New Orleans world is just as beautifully crafted as I knew it would be if and when she ever wrote about New Orleans. The little touches of local tribalism (chess pie, anyone?) were simply perfect without the slightest hint of cliché. A perfect example of this is her incorporation of the Muses shoe. The shoes are always beautiful and deeply coveted; adding in one would be a trope in the hands of a less skilled author. But Lippman adds that little unique touch that takes it from trope to brilliant detail–the dust. The shoes are fricking dust magnets that are impossible to clean because of the glitter, and that’s the kind of touch only a local might know to add, so much so that I thought why the fuck have I never talked about how goddamned dusty those gorgeously decorated shoes get?
It made me, with at least seventeen New Orleans novels to my credit and countless short stories, feel like an amateur New Orleans novelist.
She also managed to work the pandemic into it so that it becomes pivotal to the plot, which I was beginning to think wasn’t possible and something I’ve wanted to do, but have been afraid to try.
This book is an exceptional, compulsive read–and an excellent addition to the Lippman canon. Every book is different–which is amazing–so it’s impossible to say one is better than the other, but her continual growth as a writer and the risks she is willing to take is just another one of the reasons she will be known as one of the greatest writers, let alone crime writers, of our time.
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Queer and Loathing in America 