With Lippman, there’s never just one story, but rather a string of overlapping and contradictory Olen Steinhauer stories.

Sandy, an aging widower who works cold cases for extra cash, is looking into the 1986 murder of Julie, a stripper turned restaurateur and reputed mistress of Felix Brewer, an amiable and charming-if not exactly legit-businessman who, facing criminal charges and almost certainly jail time, took a powder ten years earlier.īut that’s not the whole story. “People never changed,” muses retired homicide dick Roberto “Sandy” Sanchez at one point, “until they did.” It’s a telling remark, because in this swirling, carefully plotted thriller, it’s the assumptions we have of other people that provide the fuel for this particular bonfire of vanity and betrayal. Cain, another Baltimore scribe who knew a thing or two about noir, Lippman knows the real heart of darkness lies not in over-the-top cartoons, exploding buildings, and slo-mo gross-outs, but in the stories we tell each other. And when he does, no one will ever be the same.Like James M. Somewhere between the secrets and lies connecting past and present, Sandy will find the truth. And at the center is the missing man Felix Brewer.

What he discovers is a tangled web stretching over three decades that connects five intriguing women. Now, twenty-six years after Julie went missing, Roberto “Sandy” Sanchez, a retired Baltimore detective working cold cases for some extra cash, is investigating her murder. When Julie disappears ten years to the day that Felix went on the lam, everyone assumes she’s left to join her old lover-until her remains are eventually found.

Though Bambi has no idea where her husband-or his money-might be, she suspects one woman does: his mistress, Julie. But on the Fourth of July, 1976, Bambi’s comfortable world implodes when Felix, newly convicted and facing prison, mysteriously vanishes. Thanks to his lucrative-if not all legal-businesses, she and their three little girls live in luxury. When Felix Brewer meets Bernadette “Bambi” Gottschalk at a Valentine’s Dance in 1959, he charms her with wild promises, some of which he actually keeps. Laura Lippman, the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of The Most Dangerous Thing, I’d Know You Anywhere, and What the Dead Know, returns with an addictive story that explores how one man’s disappearance echoes through the lives of the wife, mistress, and daughters he left behind.

After I'm Gone by Laura Lippman