Hush Hush LP: A Tess Monaghan Novel

Melisandre, a rich woman who killed the youngest of her three daughters, has re-emerged in Baltimore. While she makes a plea with her re-married ex-husband to see her two daughters, Melisandre has hired a down-on-her-luck documentarian to produce a film about Melisandre and the mental difficulties that caused her to kill her child. Woven throughout the narrative of the story are the transcripts from the documentary, which provides a disjointed feeling to the story’s flow. Melisandre starts receiving threatening notes and it escalates from there.

Because this master manipulator is a close friend of Tess Monaghan’s uncle, the private investigator is pulled into this case in Laura Lippman’s Hush Hush. Meanwhile, Tess continues her adjustment to motherhood with Carla Scout and domestic life with Crow, but her relative calm is disturbed by increasingly threatening notes she receives. When someone turns up dead, accusations and arrests happen, unravelling any chance for the girls’ happiness.

The characters are fleshed out, and Lippman has worked to make the tenuous connections feel concrete. It’s a fast-paced action book that I thought escalated nicely, but finished too quickly. There are some unbelievable moments, but readers will want to solve the mysteries alongside Tess.