[title subtitle=”review: Anita Paddock”][/title]
By Laura Lippman
William Morrow: $26.99
Author Laura Lippman has twenty mystery novels under her belt, but I’ve only recently discovered her, and that was after listening to an interview on the radio, where I was impressed by how smart she is.
Lippman is a native of Baltimore, where all her novels are set. The city is as much a character in her books as the fictional characters she writes about. She shares this love of all things Baltimore — crab cakes, the Enoch Pratt Library, Edgar Allan Poe — with crime writers like Dennis Lehane and those talented creators of the excellent HBO series, The Wire.
As a former reporter for the Baltimore Sun, Lippman has the nose for a good story. When she read about Julius Salsbury, the head of a gambling operation in Baltimore who disappeared in the 1970s, leaving behind a wife, three daughters, and a mistress, she realized she should use that true story as a blueprint for a mystery novel.
In After I’m Gone, we meet Felix Brewer, a flamboyant man who marries a beautiful woman named Bambi. He showers his wife and their three daughters with beautiful clothes, a beautiful home — everything his unlawfully successful business schemes can provide. Felix also has an eye for other women, and even though Bambi suspects, she puts up with it because she believes Felix loves her best.
The first chapter begins on the Fourth of July, 1976, when Felix kisses his wife and daughters goodbye and flees Baltimore shortly before he was supposed to begin serving a prison sentence. He escapes by hiding in a horse trailer driven by his mistress to an abandoned airfield where he is flown by private plane to his hideout.
The novel then jumps to 2012, and we meet Sandy Sanchez, a retired Baltimore detective who is trying to solve a cold case involving the murder of the mistress who helped Felix escape. The book then shifts into the lives of Bambi, a now aging beauty, and her three grown daughters who were all affected by the desertion of their husband and father. Who killed the mistress? And why?
The answer is found by going forward and backward in time, uncovering clues, and finally solving the mystery of the dead mistress and exactly where Felix had been hiding out after fleeing Baltimore. The chapters have dates on them, which helps since the story is not told in chronological order. And Lippman is an expert in unfolding a story, adding one piece of the puzzle at a time. That’s what makes this mystery such an entertaining read, and it’s why she has such a loyal readership. She gives her audience exactly what they want, and she keeps us guessing until the very end.
