Twists keep readers hoping for
With her new psychological crime novel, Laura Lippman lights a burner and turns up the heat.
“Sunburn,” set largely in a 1995-era small town in Delaware, pays homage to and emulates some of the best noir fiction.
The story stars a mysterious redheaded heroine. Or is she an anti-heroine? The plot will keep readers guessing until the final pages.
Polly Hansen — who goes by this name and a variety of others throughout her story — has abruptly left her husband and their toddler daughter on a Delaware beach. She is determined to head west as soon as she can afford to do so but, in the meantime, takes a job as a waitress in the run-down High-Ho diner in Belleville, Delaware.
On her trail is a private investigator, hired not by Polly’s husband but by someone else eager to track ■ down the elusive redhead.
Adam, the handsome and seemingly ethical investigator, quickly falls under the spell of the mysterious and taciturn Polly. They begin a steamy, secretive affair.
Adam stalls his employer, who presses him for more information, even as he begins to suspect Polly’s background is more complicated than he knows. She left her husband and child, but there were a previous husband and child, not to mention a few deaths and criminal charges and prison time for Polly.
Lippman spins a dark story embellished with references to the time and
place — a jukebox that plays the 1994 hit “Waterfalls,” for instance, and mentions of the O.J. Simpson trial. She seems to have purposely chosen a time when her characters wouldn’t constantly be checking email and cellphones.
And, she often nods to the era of the genre she’s emulating.
When Polly’s husband, seeking to track his wife, walks into a detective’s office, Lippman writes: “Not how he imagined it. He realizes he was imagining an old movie: Venetian blinds behind a glass panel with the agency’s name stenciled in gold letters. ‘This gun for hire.’ Here, there is a plastic nameplate, Security Associates. Inside, Sue