14 Best Laura Lippman Books

Decades after two sisters vanished from a Baltimore shopping mall, a disoriented woman in a hit and run claims to be the younger girl. Her shifting story sends police and social workers back through old files and broken families to decide whether she is victim, impostor, or something in between.

When Baltimore gambler Felix Brewer flees federal charges on the Fourth of July, he leaves behind a wife, three daughters, and his mistress. Decades later a retired cop working cold cases reopens the long unsolved murder of that mistress, uncovering what Felix's disappearance really cost the women in his life.

By day, Heloise is a suburban single mother running a small lobbying business; in reality she oversees an upscale escort service built from the ruins of an abusive past. When an old murder case and a fellow madam's death threaten to expose her, she fights to protect her son and her hard won autonomy.

In 1960s Baltimore, restless housewife Maddie Schwartz leaves her comfortable Jewish suburb to become a newspaper reporter. Determined to matter, she inserts herself into two cases, the disappearance of a young girl and the death of a Black woman whose body is found in a park fountain, and discovers the cost of ambition.

In the mid 1990s, drifter Polly Costello walks away from her husband and young daughter during a beach vacation and lands in a small Delaware town. There she falls into a charged affair with a stranger who may be tailing her for someone else, as secrets, insurance money, and violence converge.

Newly elected state's attorney Luisa Brant moves back into her childhood home and takes on what seems like an open and shut murder case. As she prepares for trial, long buried memories from her adolescence near Wilde Lake resurface, forcing her to question her family's history and the stories that once comforted her.

Two little girls once took a baby from an unattended stroller, and the child never came home. Seven years later they are released from juvenile detention just as another toddler disappears in eerily similar circumstances, forcing everyone involved to confront what really happened that first terrible summer.

Decades after a prom night disaster that made her a tabloid villain, Amber Glass drifts back to Baltimore and crosses paths with her old boyfriend, now a wealthy developer with a picture perfect family. Their uneasy reunion stirs up questions about guilt, desire, and who really wrote the story everyone believed.

On the last day of school, three inseparable girls enter a high school bathroom and shots are fired behind the locked door. One is dead, one gravely wounded, and the third cannot tell the same story twice, leaving detectives to untangle friendship, jealousy, and long buried lies.

When her Baltimore newspaper folds, out of work reporter Tess Monaghan agrees to look into the murder of a flashy lawyer who was sleeping with her friend's fiancee. Clearing her rowing buddy means diving into city politics, newsroom grudges, and a killer who knows she is looking.

Newly licensed PI Tess has set up shop in the rough Butchers Hill neighborhood when Luther Beale, infamous for shooting a teen vandal, hires her to find the kids who witnessed his crime. As those witnesses start dying, she confronts Baltimore's juvenile justice system and the cost of vigilante rage.

Tycoon Wink Wynkowski is poised to bring pro basketball back to Baltimore when a damning expose about his past suddenly appears in the paper. Hired to track down the hacker behind the story, Tess uncovers a tangle of money, sports, and murder that goes far beyond one leaked article.

After a freak accident leaves bestselling novelist Gerry Andersen bedridden in his Baltimore penthouse, he starts receiving calls from a woman claiming to be the real life inspiration for his most famous character. Painkillers, unreliable caregivers, and a dead body in his bed make it hard to tell if he is haunted or hunted.

Muriel Blossom, a widowed former assistant to Tess Monaghan, is jolted out of her routine when she finds a winning lottery ticket. Treating herself to a river cruise in France, she stumbles into flirtations, a suspicious death, and a missing piece of art that turn her trip into an amateur sleuth's dream.