Search - The Sugar House (Tess Monaghan, Bk 5)

Tess is back - and life is grand....well, if not grand, then great....well, ok it's.........ah nuts, some days it doesn't pay to get out of bed! Tess and her Dad butt heads and attitudes in this one. Baltimore is shadowed by the Domino Sugar sign - but murder is never sweet. This is the first Tess Monaghan story for me, but won't be the last.

I give this book 4 stars, it was hard to put down, I really like Laura Lippman has an author, haven't read anything of hers that I don't like yet.

Baltimore local Tess Monaghan thought she knew the Sugar House-the abandoned factory that remains a stubborn and defiant legacy of the city's past-until a client named Ruthie asks the newspaperwoman-turned-p.i. to investigate a year-old "Jane Doe"murder and its grim aftermath. Ruthie's low-life brother, Henry, confessed to killing a teenage runaway over a bottle of glue-and, a month into his prison term, met with the same fate as his victim. Following a precious few tantalizing clues, Tess's hunt for the truth is leading her from Baltimore's exclusive Inner Harbor to the city's seediest neighborhoods-a hunt that turns deadly with the shocking discovery of the runaway's true identity. Suddenly a supposedly solved murder case is turnig up newer, fresher corpses and newer, scarier versions of the Sugar House-places that look sweet and safe...but only from the outside.

This book held my interest. Characterization is fairly good, and the messages about eating disorders are candid and detailed. The mystery was not too hard to figure out, but I liked the protagonist and her best friend very much.