In “The Girl in the Green Raincoat,” Laura Lippman’s 2011 novella, private detective Tess Monaghan is being held hostage by her pregnancy. She’s in the third trimester, on bed rest for pre-eclampsia and, much like the photographer in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window,” Tess becomes infatuated with a stranger — a blonde in a celery-colored raincoat — she can see from inside her home. But not even a difficult pregnancy can stop this indomitable sleuth from ferreting out her story.
A little more than three years have passed, and Tess is back in “Hush Hush,” the 12th novel in Lippman’s smartly written series. Her baby was born, but she’s still feeling like a hostage. Her captor, prone to tantrums and loud wailing, is her 3-year-old daughter, Carla Scout. Tess is still a detective, and fans will be in thrall to her and her progeny in this long-awaited installment in the series.
Tess is not Lippman’s doppelganger, but she shares similarities with her creator. Like Lippman, Tess has a home in Baltimore. Like her intrepid detective, Lippman was once a newspaper reporter, and like Tess, Lippman is the mother of a young daughter. Being a mom hasn’t stopped Lippman from writing engaging novels about sinister crimes, and motherhood doesn’t stop Tess from solving them.
In “Hush Hush,” Lippman, who also writes exemplary stand-alone novels, examines the complicated and emotional relationship between mothers and daughters. With startling insight, Lippman adds a topical, pulled-from-the headlines plot point: mothers who kill their children.
Like Andrea Yates, the Texas mom who was found not guilty by reason of insanity after drowning her five children in 2001, Tess’ new client, Melisandre Harris Dawes, was found not guilty of killing her infant in 2002. She left Isadora in the back seat of her car on a scorching hot day. She didn’t forget about Isadora, she sat nearby, under a shade tree, while Isadora suffered and died. Postpartum psychosis, a judge decided, was to blame.
“Hush Hush” is anything but a quiet novel. It speaks loudly about family secrets, the stigma of mental illness, the struggle to balance family and career, and the challenges of parenting in the 21st century. It screams loudly and provocatively about the frustrations and the joys of raising children.
Melisandre spent time in a mental health facility and then left the country, giving her now ex-husband custody of their other daughters. More than a decade later, she’s back in Baltimore hoping to reunite with teenage daughters Alanna and Ruby.
Tess is hired as a security consultant for the icy Melisandre, who has been receiving creepy anonymous notes. The threat level amps up when an acquaintance of Melisandre’s is poisoned and later, when a murder occurs in a house in which Melisandre once lived.
Meanwhile, Tess is also receiving anonymous notes. Already insecure about her parenting skills, she’s shaken by one that accuses her of being a lousy mother. Good parenting is at the heart of this story, and Lippman plays out this universal theme by comparing and contrasting Tess and Melisandre.
Tess knows how children can test a parent’s sanity but doesn’t understand how that could lead to taking a life. And what Melisandre tells Tess is chilling: “I’m every woman’s worst nightmare. Because whenever a woman kills a child, every other mother — at least, every one who’s honest with herself — has a flash of sympathy. Not empathy. They don’t want to have done it, cannot imagine doing it. But they know.”
What kind of woman would kill her child, Tess wonders. Was Melisandre truly mentally ill when she left Isadora to die or was she faking it? How can parents abandon their children? Would you betray your child to save yourself? And most important for Tess, how far would you go to protect your child from danger? Before the novel ends, Tess will learn the answers to all these questions.
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In the novel’s “Author’s Note,” Lippman says that before she became a mother “a lot of people happily predicted that I would no longer write at the same pace. They were wrong.” Not only does she continue to write a book a year, she continues to serve up gripping tales filled with tension, brilliant plotting and a complex, relatable heroine.
Carol Memmott also reviews books for the Washington Post.
“Hush Hush”
By Laura Lippman, William Morrow, 307 pages, $26.99