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After I’m Gone
New York Times best seller Laura Lippman returns with a classic story of murder and mystery, in which one man’s disappearance echoes through the lives of his wife, daughters – and mistress.
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When Felix Brewer meets nineteen-year-old Bernadette ‘Bambi’ Gottschalk at a dance in 1959, he charms her with wild promises. But on the Fourth of July, 1976, Bambi’s world implodes when Felix, newly convicted and facing prison, mysteriously vanishes.
Though Bambi has no idea where her husband – or his money – might be, she suspects one woman does: his devoted young mistress, Julie. When Julie herself disappears ten years to the day that Felix went on the lam, everyone assumes she’s left to join her old lover – until her remains are found in a secluded wooded park.
Now, twenty-six years after Julie went missing, Roberto ‘Sandy’ Sanchez, a retired Baltimore detective working cold cases for some extra cash, is investigating her murder. What he discovers is a tangled web of bitterness, jealously, resentment and greed stretching over the three decades and three generations that connect these five very different women. And at the center of every woman’s story is the man who, though long gone, has never been forgotten: the enigmatic Felix Brewer.
Laura Lippman's New York Times bestseller is a florid noir that spans the decades. Murder and mayhem intertwine as shyster Felix Brewer disappears and leaves his wife, mistress and three daughters to untangle his messy past.
The characters in Laura Lippman's After I'm Gone are so well drawn that it's easy to forget why they happen to be connected...Lippman is able to sustain a remarkable degree of detail about all [the] characters and still keep them sharply distinct and interesting.
Lippman is as skillful at plot as she is at characters and setting, and the twists in the novel's final pages are both surprising and satisfying. They contain some well-earned messages about love and loyalty, illusion and delusion. Like everything else Lippman has written, After I'm Gone transcends the limits of genre. Like George Pelecanos, Michael Connelly, Dennis Lehane and a handful of others, she writes books that are great fun but also serious fun.
One of richest portraits of (four) complicated women in ages. Smart, resonant, moving, deeply rewarding.
'Her books unfold the secrets of ordinary middle-class American women in effortless prose and great acuity. After I'm Gone could well be her best yet, a multi-narrative story about a man who falls in love with a woman and then disappears. A clever, gripping, page-turning delight.'
Coaxing the inevitable out of the improbable, Lippman is a bet you just can't lose.
Laura Lippman’s novels have won many crime fiction prizes, including the Edgar, Anthony and Agatha Awards. Sunburn (2018), her second consecutive novel to win the eDunnit Award at Crimefest, was also nominated for the CWA Gold Dagger Award and was a Waterstones Book of the Month. Her 2019 novel Lady in the Lake featured in numerous Best of Year Lists,…
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