Laura Lippman Books in Order

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.

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.

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.

A newspaper clipping and photograph of her musician ex, Crow, labeled in big trouble, lure Tess from Baltimore to the music clubs of Texas. There she finds a vanished band, family secrets, and a case that tests how well she ever knew the man she once loved.

A family friend asks Tess to review an old case in which a junkie confessed to killing a teenage runaway and then died in prison. Chasing the thin trail of a nameless Jane Doe, Tess moves from Baltimore's Inner Harbor to wealthy suburbs, exposing political games and a very dangerous refuge.

Curious about the anonymous visitor who leaves roses and cognac at Edgar Allan Poe's grave each year, Tess stakes out the ritual and sees a man shot dead in the cemetery. Drawn into a case steeped in literary obsession and greed, she finds that someone is now leaving her macabre clues.

Ordered into anger management, Tess takes a consulting job with a nonprofit reviewing five unsolved domestic violence homicides. What begins as paperwork turns into a road trip through small town Maryland, where she and an obsessed ex cop realize the deaths may point to one relentless killer with Tess in the crosshairs.

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.

A devout Baltimore businessman hires Tess to find his missing wife and three children, who seem to have run off with another man. Tracking them pulls Tess into a web of hidden identities, uneasy alliances, and hard questions about how far someone will go to escape a controlling family.

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.

This anthology, edited by Laura Lippman, collects original noir stories set in distinct Baltimore neighborhoods. Lippman and fellow writers explore row houses, corner bars, harbor views, and alleys where everyday frustrations curdle into crime.

Working as a consultant to the local paper, Tess treats the murder of a young federal prosecutor as just another case to diagram. Then her boyfriend brings home a teenage grifter who knows too much, and Tess's choice to protect him pits her against federal agents and a ruthless killer.

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.

A married man drifts into an affair he never really meant to have and then discovers his lover is far more intense, and more dangerous, than he imagined. As she tightens her hold, his panic grows, but escaping may cost him more than his comfortable life.

When Tess nearly collides with a film crew while rowing, she lands a job protecting the temperamental young star of a TV series shooting in Baltimore. Sabotage, accidents, and ugly secrets swirl on set, and Tess must sort petty drama from real danger before the production turns deadly.

An overextended suburban wife, drowning in debt and domestic chores, grabs at a too good to be true business opportunity. When the scheme starts to look dangerous, she has to choose between protecting her family and cashing in on a chance to change her life.

On Preakness weekend in a working class Baltimore neighborhood, two young men try to turn the chaos around the racetrack into quick cash. What looks like easy money instead exposes them to a brutal crime and forces them to confront how little control they really have.

A self described Good Samaritan chronicles his erotic exploits in a letter that begins like fantasy and turns increasingly sinister. The more he writes, the clearer it becomes that his hobby of helping strangers may hide a streak of calculated cruelty.

A Baltimore contractor hired to build a wine cellar for an alluring client becomes fascinated by her secrets and her oddly insistent husband. The job slowly turns into an unsettling meditation on guilt, renovation, and what you are willing to seal up behind new walls.

A widowed grandmother with money troubles meets a younger woman in a coffee shop who introduces her to the world of fetish pornography. Discovering she can sell a certain fantasy, she weighs shame against the thrill of power and the promise of financial freedom.

This collection gathers crime stories and novellas, many set in Baltimore, featuring sharp, morally thorny women and the men who underestimate them. Some pieces star Tess Monaghan, while others follow housewives, hustlers, and teens whose choices push them across the line into violence.

On a lonely work trip, an American traveler in Dublin stumbles into a flirtation in her hotel bar that feels like the start of an adventure. As drinks blur into secrets, she must decide whether reinvention is worth the risk she is running.

In this Heloise story, a suburban soccer mom with a secret life running an escort service tries to keep her worlds apart. When a relationship shifts from business to something more complicated, she must decide what she is willing to risk to keep her child and her livelihood safe.

During Mardi Gras in New Orleans, a smooth talker thinks he has found two easy marks in a pair of glamorous party girls. As the night wears on, he realizes he may be playing a role in someone else's carefully scripted scheme.

In this Tess Monaghan short story, a simple favor tied to a favorite Cuban stew draws Tess into a small scale neighborhood mystery. A missing recipe, simmering resentments, and a suspicious fire show how quickly domestic disputes can turn sharp.

A high end madam and suburban mother thinks she can keep her worlds neatly separated: clients, husband, and child. When a possible blackmailer appears, her carefully managed life begins to crack, and she has to decide how far she will go to protect the family she built.

A teenage babysitter understands the unspoken rules of being trusted in other people's homes far better than the adults around her. When a line is crossed and a secret turns dangerous, she makes a choice that exposes how fragile that trust really is.

Two young women obsessed with losing weight come up with a reckless plan that treats starvation and petty crime as just another fad. Their friendship sours as hunger, envy, and bad decisions lead them toward a violent breaking point.

In late pregnancy and confined to bed, Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan passes the time watching a woman in a green raincoat walk her dog each day. When the dog appears alone, Tess investigates from her sun porch, uncovering a missing woman and older crimes.

A longtime shoeshine man in a historic Baltimore hotel witnesses a confrontation that echoes a tragedy from his own past. When Tess Monaghan steps in to calm a barroom scuffle, she uncovers the quiet grief behind the older man's sharp eyes and polished shoes.

A magazine editor looks back on the slow unravelling of her marriage to a brilliant but depressed husband. As she recalls small compromises and unsettling incidents, she weighs whether love, obligation, or fear really kept them together.

Memoirist Cassandra Fallows returns to Baltimore in search of a new book idea and fixates on a former classmate once jailed for refusing to explain what happened to her missing infant son. Digging into the case forces Cassandra to question her own memories and the stories she tells about herself.

Eliza Benedict's settled life as a suburban wife and mother is shattered when she receives a letter from Walter Bowman, the man who kidnapped her as a teenager. Now on death row, he wants her attention and maybe her help, forcing Eliza to revisit a past she has tried hard to forget.

A group of children once shared a secret in the woods outside Baltimore, a secret tied to the death of the boy who led them. Years later, after another tragedy, the now grown friends are drawn back together and forced to confront what really happened and what they owe each other.

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.

This companion volume gathers earlier Heloise stories, tracing her path from troubled young woman to competent suburban madam and mother. It deepens the backstory behind And When She Was Good, showing how carefully she constructed a life that could still collapse in an instant.

When expensive children's picture books keep disappearing from a cozy Baltimore shop each Saturday, Tess Monaghan offers her services for free. Tracking the book thief leads her into the odd world of collectors, free book exchanges, and a scheme that says a lot about who thinks they own stories.

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.

In a quiet small town, high schooler Beth spends her summer slicing cold cuts at the deli and tracking a string of unexplained fires. When an old friend returns and the blazes creep closer to home, Beth realizes the truth may be far more personal than anyone suspects.

Years after being found not guilty by reason of insanity for leaving her baby to die in a hot car, Melisandre Harris Dawes returns to Baltimore to film a documentary and reconnect with her surviving daughters. Hired to provide security, Tess finds herself judging another woman's motherhood while protecting her own child.

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.

Gathering three of Lippman's sharpest tales about adolescent girls, this mini collection explores how teenage anger, loyalty, and boredom can tip into danger. The stories revisit a babysitter, a grieving tomboy, and a girl skating on literal and emotional thin ice.

This quartet of darkly funny stories showcases women who turn the tables on men who misread them. From a senior citizen porn performer to starving twenty somethings and a tourist in Dublin, each narrator plays with power, desire, and revenge in unexpected ways.

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.

This ebook bundle brings together several Tess Monaghan short pieces, including Ropa Vieja and The Shoeshine Man's Regrets, plus a profile of Tess and a story about her mother. It is a compact way to see the series from different angles and points in time.

Linked by the theme of men in over their heads, these stories follow characters who misjudge the women around them. Young guys on city streets, a weary editor, a cheating husband, and a flirtatious contractor all learn that strength does not always look the way they expect.

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 this essay collection, Lippman writes candidly about aging into middle life, late motherhood, friendship, body image, and her years in newsrooms and on book tour. The pieces read like smart, personal conversations that illuminate the experiences behind her crime fiction.

Teacher Liz Kelsey vows she will stop snooping on her unfaithful husband, until she finds a secret phone loaded with flirtatious texts. As she studies each new message, her anger evolves into a plan, and the question becomes who is really in control of their marriage.

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.

This story collection spans long cons, bookstore thefts, neighborhood gossip, and pandemic era marriage trouble, often returning to Tess Monaghan and her family. Across the pieces, girls, wives, and mothers navigate small deceptions that sometimes slide into crimes.

In this playful profile originally written as a magazine style piece, Laura Lippman interviews her own creation, private investigator Tess Monaghan. The article fills in Tess's childhood, habits, and relationships, offering fans an in universe look at what makes her tick between cases.

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.

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.