What the Dead Know

What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman

This is a great mystery novel. The story takes place in the present and the past. In the present a mysterious woman gets into a traffic accident that requires a hospital stay and questions by police. She refuses to reveal her identity, and claims that she is one of two sisters that went missing decades previously. The parts of the novel that occur in the past are not flashbacks but rather they follow the sisters the day they went missing. The tension between the two accounts create a complicated yarn where the facts of both storylines becomes fuzzy and uncertain. What really happened to the sisters long ago? And does the woman claiming to be one of them returned telling the truth? Or is she just a impostor who has been leading everyone along?

In the end the truth is a good place to hide because it is so easily twisted to meet other people’s expectations. The real delight for me was how three dimensional the characters become over the course of the novel. Their heartbreaks (and there are a lot of those) ring true and are the best kind of engrossing.

Definitely worth a read!