Laura Lippman’s latest, Prom Mom (Faber), opens as a teenage girl wakes in the bathroom of her hotel room after the prom. She’s alone, covered in blood, remembering the stomach pains she had the night before. This is Amber, otherwise known as Prom Mom, after the police arrive at her house later and ask her about the newborn a maid found on the floor in room 717. Amber hadn’t even known she was pregnant. “I woke up and the baby was dead,” she tells the detectives, before asking if she can get back her prom dress that she’d left on the bed.
Twenty years on, Amber returns to the Baltimore town where it happened, keen to bump into Joe, known back then in the tabloids as Cad Dad for leaving her alone to give birth. Now he is happily married to Meredith and seemingly the master of his own small world. “She would not try to meet Joe or cross his path. But this was Smalltimore, after all, and it was probably only a matter of time before they encountered each other.”
Lippman is such an incisive writer, slicing to the heart of people’s darker sides. As ever, she is piercingly insightful, too, whether considering how a teenage girl could overlook a pregnancy or the impact of Covid isolation on a childless couple such as Meredith and Joe.
Kevin Powers, who served in the US army in Iraq, won various awards for his literary debut, The Yellow Birds. A Line in the Sand (Sceptre), his third novel, is still finely written, but I’m pleased to report that it’s definitely a thriller, drawing from Powers’s experiences of combat to create a cracking mystery. It begins with Arman, a former interpreter in Iraq, finding a body on the beach in Virginia. As detective Catherine Wheel and her new partner investigate, they discover more about Arman’s tragic past: how he witnessed something terrible and then survived an assassination attempt that killed his wife and young child. Was the murder connected to what he saw? We also meet young journalist Sally, whose brother was killed in combat and who is investigating a private corporation about to land a huge government defence contract. The novel gathers pace as the body count mounts and Cat and Sally team up to try to protect Arman, who is hauntingly depicted. Let’s hope Powers sticks to writing thrillers, because A Line in the Sand is a blast.
A woman is walking along a dark road late at night in a short skirt, phone out of battery, when a car slows to ask her if she needs help. She is looking for someone dangerous, the monster who took her sister. Is this the night her search comes to an end?
I was absolutely blown sideways by the twist in Catherine Ryan Howard’s The Trap (Bantam), a white-knuckle ride of a serial killer thriller. Loosely inspired by the women who went missing in Ireland’s “Vanishing Triangle”, it follows the story of Lucy, whose sibling Nicki disappeared months earlier, her phone abandoned near the pub she left alone. She is one of at least three Irish women who have gone missing, but the police investigation is making little headway, and Lucy, frustrated and desperate, decides to take matters into her own hands. Throw in the brilliant detective Denise and occasional chilling insights from the killer himself, and you’ve got a corker of a read.
Pitch a book to me as a “feminist update of Rosemary’s Baby”, as Danielle Valentine’s Delicate Condition (Profile) is described, and I am very interested. Anna Alcott is a famous actor who is desperate to have a baby with her husband, Dex. She is in the middle of a gruelling IVF regime, but her medicines keep getting lost and her medical appointments move around. Once she does fall pregnant, she asks herself whether this confusion is just “pregnancy brain”. Then the ultrasound of Anna’s child is stolen and the doctors tell her she has lost her baby. Written while the author was pregnant with her first child, Delicate Condition is an indictment of how women are treated during pregnancy, dismissed and ignored, their pain overlooked.
To order Prom Mom, A Line in the Sand, The Trap or Delicate Condition go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
