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A breathtaking stand-alone thriller from the acclaimed, award-winning author of the Tess Monaghan series and LADY IN THE LAKE.
Made into a major film starring Dakota Fanning and Diane Lane
It is early evening, summer time and hot. Two eleven-year-old girls, Alice and Ronnie, are on their way home from a swimming party when they happen to see a baby’s stroller, with baby girl sleeping inside, left unattended on the top step of a house. Ronnie says to Alice: ‘We have to take care of this baby.’ But what exactly does she mean?
Four days later the body of little Olivia Barnes is discovered in a hut in Baltimore’s rambling Leakin Park by a young rookie detective, Nancy Porter. What can have happened in those four days to bring about this appalling crime? The girls are arrested and found guilty. Seven years later Ronnie and Alice, now eighteen, are released from their separate prisons, back into their old neighbourhood where the mother of baby Olivia still lives. Another child goes missing, and Nancy Porter and her partner get the case …
Made into a major film starring Dakota Fanning and Diane Lane
It is early evening, summer time and hot. Two eleven-year-old girls, Alice and Ronnie, are on their way home from a swimming party when they happen to see a baby’s stroller, with baby girl sleeping inside, left unattended on the top step of a house. Ronnie says to Alice: ‘We have to take care of this baby.’ But what exactly does she mean?
Four days later the body of little Olivia Barnes is discovered in a hut in Baltimore’s rambling Leakin Park by a young rookie detective, Nancy Porter. What can have happened in those four days to bring about this appalling crime? The girls are arrested and found guilty. Seven years later Ronnie and Alice, now eighteen, are released from their separate prisons, back into their old neighbourhood where the mother of baby Olivia still lives. Another child goes missing, and Nancy Porter and her partner get the case …
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Reviews
One of the best novelists around, period
[Lippman] only seems to be getting better
Exquisite as fine jewellery
Every time Laura Lippman comes out with a new book, I get chills because I know I am back in the hands of the master. She is simply a brilliant novelist, an unflinching chronicler of life in America right now
Solidifies her position in the upper tier of today's suspense novelists ... With this book, much darker than any in her past series, Lippman shows she is an author willing to take risks in both writing and storytelling. Her deft handling of this disturbing material is sure to increase the breadth of her readership
Exquisite as fine jewellery.
A chilling study of mothers, daughters, love, and murder ... Lucid, tight, and compelling
Laura Lippman is among the select group of novelists who have invigorated the crime fiction arena with smart, innovative, and exciting work
Lippman has enriched literature as a whole
Lippman is the closest writer America has to Ruth Rendell
A book full of rich, complex characters coupled with a gripping plot that's always one step ahead of the reader. And as with real life, it's the reader who's left to work out just who is the real victim in the this emotionally charged tale
"A book full of rich, complex characters coupled with a gripping plot that's always one step ahead of the reader. And as with real life, it's the reader who's left to work out just who is the real victim in the this emotionally charged tale."