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The Power Of Three

Paperback / ISBN-13: 9780752877730

Price: £9.99

ON SALE: 15th June 2006

Genre: Fiction & Related Items / Crime & Mystery

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Three girls were best friends – until friendship became murder…

Baltimore police receive an urgent call out to a school after gunshots are heard coming from a locked girls’ toilet. The police find three victims, but only Josie is conscious, and she insists she is not the shooter. Perri is unconscious from a bullet wound that has ripped through her jaw; and Kat is dead, shot in the chest.

Detective Lenhardt soon uncovers information that is at odds with the story Josie is telling. Other clues at the scene suggest there was a fourth girl who witnessed the entire episode from behind a locked stall. Where is she now? How did she get out?

The crime seems to reach back five years before this fatal shooting, when three girls met aged ten, and took a vow of eternal friendship. How did that passionate friendship change, evolve – and finally fall apart?

Reviews

Terrific characterisation ... Lippman is weighed down with US crime writing awards - the Anthony, Edgar, Shamas, Agatha and Nero ... taken as a study of character, The Power of Three, narrated from multiple points of view that allows Lippman to dig deep into the teenagers' psyches, is engrossing
OBSERVER
Why can be as important as who in creating a compelling mystery, as Laura Lippman shows in THE POWER OF THREE ... Lippman has produced a vivid portrait of a little piece of middle America, a thoughtful and sensitive novel which makes disquieting reading
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
Wonderfully paced, really well crafted ...The best book of hers that I've read
Kate Atkinson, author of CASE HISTORIES
A searching look at the implosion of the American dream into every parent's worst nightmare
KIRKUS
Lippman is among that select group of novelists who have reinvigorated the crime fiction arena with her smart, innovative and exciting work
George Pelecanos
Laura Lippman understands perfectly the power of adolescent passions and how easily they spiral out of control. Read THE POWER OF THREE and despair of a world where guns are easier to come by than drugs
Val McDermid
This is an outstanding example of writing that successfully combines suspense with acute insight into the dark recesses of human nature
GUARDIAN
Lippman is often compared to such writers as the glorious Anne Tyler and the impeccable James M. Cain. Indeed, her writing is a heady concoction of similar skills
Christina Appleyard, DAILY MAIL
Powerful ... A gripping tale that is a mystery only in the same sense as To Kill a Mockingbird was ... Brilliant, insightful, moving
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
Spectacular ... A fast, cleverly elusive story
NEW YORK TIMES
A major work of suspense
CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER