Book Review: Laura Lippman's The Girl in the Green Raincoat

The Girl in the Green Raincoat, by Laura Lippman (William Morrow, 193 pages, 2011, $13.99) Available in the Howard County public libraries

She’s Back! And Shorter!

Our lovely local* (yes, local!) Laura Lippman/Tess Monaghan is back in this novella, first appearing in The New York Times magazine! (We had mistakenly thought this was a new title.)

And so Begins. . . .

“I am being held hostage. . . The agenda is unclear. The demands vague but she is prepared to hold me here for two months. Twelve weeks or eighteen years, depending on how you look at it.”

And so begins, a la Rear Window, a novella in which we find our protagonist on bed rest for the last two months of her pregnancy trying to solve a murder or murders that may or may not have happened.

We Love Baltimore, But, . . . .

Well, not sure we all do love Baltimore (perhaps not even Mr. Trump), but we have lived nearby long enough that we are fairly familiar with the city. Enough so that we recognize when Lippman mentions BG&E and Hopkins and the Helmand (an Afghan restaurant owned by a brother of the former leader of Afghanistan), Carroll County, and Annapolis, the town. Familiar and comfortable. Lippman is not a name-dropper but carefully weaves in the neighborhoods of Baltimore so the city becomes a character in her novels as well.

Where are the Dogs?

Central. Yes, there is a Dobie, and a Grey and even a biting foster (found) IG** who takes over and uses a chamber pot (I kid you not!) but, in the end, turns out to love the new baby and so, he, Dempsey (dog), is accepted by his accidental furever family.

Gotta Love Whitney

My favorite character plays a larger role in this story, one of a dozen Tess Monaghan books and three short stories. Whitney, the very very wealthy Whitney, is assigned to room with Tess in college and they become unlikely best buddies. Whitney currently lives in a cottage on her parents’ estate and chairs the family foundation at 35, after having held three jobs in about a dozen years. Whitney is a down-to-earth little rich girl – fascinating. In The Girl in the Green Raincoat, Whitney plays a large role as Tess’ assistant (the feet) in solving the crime, the crime that they solved almost by accident since it was not the one they thought it was and since Tess was on bed-rest.

Writer’s Style

We’ve read a lot of Lippman over the years but as boyfriend Crow became more and more of a “main squeeze,” we veered away from the Tess books.

However, Lippman has deservedly won all the major crime story awards in the industry and rightly so. The Green Raincoat opening is magnetic (see above), her writing style is comfortable, funny in places, and it accelerates - plus, the reader learns a bit about Baltimore (but not enough to want to visit, taking after our president recently).

I would suggest you read this book rather quickly since there are a lot of characters at least mentioned that you might only recall by name time after time. In addition, though we loved a shorter Lippman, we felt it accelerated too quickly around the climax – and the after-climax may be lost on all but the die-hard fans. In other words, the book could have been even shorter.

All in All

Welcome back, Tess!

*Graduate of Wilde Lake High School, Columbia, MD where I would have attended had it been built!

**a Doberman Pinscher, a Greyhound, and a (small) Italian Greyhound