Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A redheaded waitress, a good-looking private eye, insurance fraud, arson, rough sex, and a long hot summer: some like it noir.With her 23rd novel, Lippman (Wilde Lake, 2016, etc.) pays tribute to a literary predecessor who, like her, began his study of crime as a journalist at the Baltimore SunJames M. Cain, author of The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and Mildred Pierce. Lippman's version of the sexy stranger passing through town starts with Polly Costello (that's one of her names, anyway) on a beach vacation in Fenwick, Delaware, with her husband and 3-year-old daughter, Jani. One morning she says she needs a break from the sun, then grabs her duffel and heads down the road. "What kind of woman walks out on her family? Gregg knows. The kind of woman he picked up in a bar four years ago precisely because she had that kind of wildcat energy.She scratched, she bit, she was up for anything, anywhere, anytime." Actually, poor Gregg, suddenly a single dad, doesn't know the half of it. Someone who does have a much fuller picture of Polly's background is Adam, a good-looking, Oberlin- and culinary-institute-educated fellow she runs into at a bar her first day on the lam. Neither Adam nor Polly is candid about what has brought them to stools at the High-Ho, but both stick around and get jobs there, as chef and waitress. By the time their connection in the bedroom blossoms into something more serious, the skeletons in the closet have been joined by fresh new ones. Lippman's trademark is populating a whodunit with characters so believably complicated that they don't need the mystery to carry the book. If that's not quite the case here, you can tell how much fun the author had updating the classic noir tropes, and it's contagious. Plotty, page-turning pleasure plus instructions on how to make a perfect grilled cheese sandwich and how to stab a man in the heart. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.