Reviewed in the Wall Street Journal, WSJ, by Tom Nolan, Sat./Sun.,Feb.15-16,2014,REVIEW section, Books, Page C10:
Roberto "Sandy" Sanchez, the retired Baltimore police detective working as a cold-case consultant in Laura Lippman's irresistible "After I'm Gone" (Morrow, 334 pages, $26.99), solves crimes through dogged persistence. When he gets an inspired notion, it's not a hunch but "an equation as neat as arithmetic . . . a proof in geometry." The problem Sandy ponders here involves the 1976 flight from justice of a wanted gambler and the disappearance 10 years later of his ex-stripper mistress, whose bones are found several years after that. The plot is rich with characters—the gambler's beautiful wife and daughters, his loyal cronies—whose stories are told in John O'Hara-like detail through flashbacks that skip back and forth across decades. Pulling the truths and lies into geometric proof is the sad-eyed Sanchez, whose working motto is: "People never changed. Until they did."
Great Suspense Novelist Laura Lippman's Latest: Read an Excerpt from After I'm Gone
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In After I’m Gone, best-selling novelist Laura Lippman explores how a man’s mysterious disappearance impacts the many women in his life—and may have led to murder. :
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Book Description
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.
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. Thanks to his lucrative—if not all legal—businesses, she and their three little girls live in luxury. But on the Fourth of July, 1976, Bambi’s comfortable world implodes when Felix, newly convicted and facing prison, mysteriously vanishes.
Though Bambi has no idea where her husband—or his money—might be, she suspects one woman does: his mistress, Julie. 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.
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. What he discovers is a tangled web stretching over three decades that connects five intriguing women. And at the center is the missing man Felix Brewer.
Somewhere between the secrets and lies connecting past and present, Sandy will find the truth. And when he does, no one will ever be the same.
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. Thanks to his lucrative—if not all legal—businesses, she and their three little girls live in luxury. But on the Fourth of July, 1976, Bambi’s comfortable world implodes when Felix, newly convicted and facing prison, mysteriously vanishes.
Though Bambi has no idea where her husband—or his money—might be, she suspects one woman does: his mistress, Julie. 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.
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. What he discovers is a tangled web stretching over three decades that connects five intriguing women. And at the center is the missing man Felix Brewer.
Somewhere between the secrets and lies connecting past and present, Sandy will find the truth. And when he does, no one will ever be the same.
