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NO GOOD DEEDS
by Laura Lippman
Harper, February 2007
400 pages
$7.99
ISBN: 0060570733


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Tess Monaghan is struggling to make it as a private eye. It doesn’t help that she has decided not to do divorce surveillance, in honor of Valentine’s Day. So when she’s offered the chance to do some consulting work for her old paper, she takes the job.

Her boyfriend Crow is a bit more of an idealist than Tess. He’s pretty broke, too. He manages to stay afloat, working his way into becoming one of those guys in the music scene that everyone knows and that knows everyone. Not a bad gig. One day, he gets suckered by a street kid and winds up bringing the kid back to Tess’s place. This turns out to be not such a good idea.

Tess becomes wound up in the fall-out from Crow’s good deed. The kid becomes a witness in a sensational murder and Tess refuses to give his name. This was all well and good when she was a reporter, but it seems PIs don’t have that same legal protection. The Feds and the local cops start leaning on her hard; she resists. Crow decides that the best way to handle this is to take off with the kid – if Tess doesn’t know where they are, her butt is covered. In the meantime, several kinds of bad guys are trying to find Crow and the kid.

This is the ninth book in the Tess Monaghan series. While Lippman is certainly skilled enough as a writer that the reader doesn’t need to have read the entire series in order to enjoy NO GOOD DEEDS, one is inclined to believe that there are certain elements of backstory that would bring more depth to the characters if the reader had read the rest of the series. Lippman brings a great sense of place to her stories, and her plotting is just about as good as it gets. If NO GOOD DEEDS is the first Lippman you pick up, odds are that you’ll track down the rest. She’s that good.

Reviewed by P.J. Coldren, May 2007

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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