"What the Dead Know"
By Laura Lippman
William Morrow, $24.95
Two sisters, 11 and 15, vanish from a suburban Baltimore shopping mall in 1975. Thirty years later, a disoriented woman picked up on a hit-and-run charge claims to be Heather, one of the missing "Bethany girls," but refuses to say what she's been doing since she and her sister Sunny disappeared so long ago. She's damaged, erratic and manipulative, drawing a lawyer, a bookish social worker and a philandering cop into the toils of her personal drama. Is she really Heather Bethany? And if not, then who is she and what does she know about the lost girls?
That's the premise of Laura Lippman's "What the Dead Know," a novel whose own snares are constituted of equal parts suspense, psychological realism and nostalgia. For crime fiction, "What the Dead Know" is daring; there isn't exactly a main character, and large parts of the narrative take place in the past -- they may or may not pertain to the identity of the woman Detective Kevin Infante insists on calling Jane Doe. The dark puzzle of what happened to Heather and Sunny is the steady pulse of the book, but along the way you may find yourself just as absorbed by the Bethany family's internal dynamics. The father, Dave, is a slightly sanctimonious counterculture control freak who listens to jazz on headphones, forbids the girls any white sugar and follows a meditation practice called "the Five-Fold Path." The mother, Miriam, is restless, unfaithful and capable of selling anything to anyone.
Lippman has also captured the treacherous politics of sisterhood. Despite being younger, the shrewd Heather ("11 going on 40," according to her mother) usually gets the better of naive, dreamy, awkward Sunny, especially when it comes to negotiating their father's many rules. Theirs is a world of Bonne Belle lip gloss, macramé and Jethro Tull albums; Lippman gets the flotsam and jetsam of mid-'70s girlhood just right. And the grown-up "Jane Doe" seems to remember it all so well herself -- from the Karmelkorn stand at the mall to the defunct department store since replaced by a J.C. Penney to the blue denim purse with rickrack trim that Heather dropped in the parking lot before she vanished. Yet there are troubling gaps in her story, things the real Heather ought to know.
Lippman's evocation of the Bethanys is so palpable that "What the Dead Know" carries a queasy charge; when characters feel this real, so do their sufferings, and the sickening horror of losing one's child to an unknown but probably ghastly fate saturates this book. You may sit up late to finish it, but not with the compulsive, lightweight ease inspired by most thrillers. That's a cost, I suppose, of reading crime fiction this believable, and in the case of "What the Dead Know," it's well worth paying.
-- Laura Miller