![]() The town’s only attraction, a minor one at that, is the ‘bar-slash-restaurant’, the High-Ho. Small town America is wonderfully evoked here. Advertising itself with vain hope as one of the best small towns in America, it’s forty miles inland, so people simply pass through it on the way to the beach. The novel is set in Belleville, Delaware, ‘a town where strangers seldom stop on a Sunday evening’ – or any other time, for that matter. Set in the 1990s, it reaches back to the 1930s noir thrillers of James McCain (think The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity) to provide an enthralling mystery that reveals itself slowly and inexorably, keeping the reader guessing right up to the end. ![]() ![]() And Sunburn is arguably her finest so far. Lippman is a superb novelist, intelligent and stylish, ‘one of the finest writers in America’ as Mark Billingham is quoted as saying on the cover of this, her latest novel – note that he doesn’t say ‘crime writers’. She’s known as a crime writer, but if that’s not your genre of choice, don’t dismiss her novels, which rise far above its normal parameters. One was a police procedural and the other a standalone – Lippman’s output is fairly evenly divided between the two. ![]() We’ve reviewed two of Laura Lippman’s novels in Shiny, here and here. ![]()
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