Search - The Last Place (Tess Monaghan, Bk 7)

An excellent entry into the Tess Monaghan series. Lippman improves with each book. This is an intricate, interesting story with believable characters that are not the ordinary everyday serial killers that I get so tired of in the bestsellers.

Absolutely excellent. Possibly the best of the series. Tess investigates 5 seemingly unrelated homicides at the request of a Baltimore non-profit and discovers they have her in common. I was expecting this one to be difficult to tie up without a lot of allowances by the reader, but it wasn't. Lippman is consistently a 5 star author with this series.

I liked this book because it explored and captured the areas around Baltimore so perfectly. Tess Monaghan is a thoroughly believable and likable character.

This review applies to the audio version.

#7 Tess Monaghan mystery set in Baltimore. Whitney, Tess's good friend, sends some work her way from a consortium of non-profits that she is on the board of. They're researching police techniques in the rural areas around the city in hopes of finding some fuel for their fire: more funding for domestic violence prevention. If they can prove that the rural police messed up and need more education, they hope to lobby the legislature for the funding.

They hand Tess five unrelated, unsolved homicides from the outlying areas and ask her to see how they were investigated. What ends up happening is that the cases aren't quite as unrelated as they thought. Tess hooks up with a former cop out on disability who had obsessed over one of the cases, and they are allowed to assist the state police peripherally when they bring the evidence of the serial killer to them.

I have to admit that the mystery itself was rather easy to figure out--the clues were just dangled in front of you and I kept wanting to smack Tess because she didn't see certain things. Then again, she was a bit distracted--having had to go into court-ordered anger-management therapy after she (and Whitney, although Tess never implicated her friend) tracked down a guy who seduced Whitney's teenage niece in an internet chat room. (Apparently the use of Nair on the entire body warrants assault. LOL)

Still a very enjoyable visit with Tess and Crow, the dogs and her friends, even though I was at least two steps ahead of them all the way. And I think I'm finally getting used to the narrator's (Barbara Rosenblatt) voice, which I found annoying as hell at first.

Excellent. I'd recommend this to anyone.

Five lives in the Baltimore area have been brutally destroyed over the past six years - five unsolved homicides, seemingly unconnected except for the suspicion that each death was the result of domestic violence. In hot legal water - and court-ordered therapy - Tess Monaghan accepts an assignment with a local nonprofit organization, agreeing to review police documents on each case for inconsistencies and investigative blunders. But curiosity is leading the disgraced p. i. off the paper trail as she follows scant leads and intuitions into the most remote corners of Maryland - where a psychopath can hide as easily in the fabric of a tiny fishing community as in the alleys and shadows of Charm City. Because a single common thread to five senseless murders is beginning to emerge with shocking clarity to tie the loose ends together into one bloody knot - and the link is Tess Monaghan herself.