Life Sentences »

Well known for her popular series of mysteries starring the fearless Tess Monoghan, Laura Lippman has won every major mystery award, from the Anthony to the Agatha.

Author Cassandra Fallows has achieved remarkable success by baring her life on the page. Her two widely popular memoirs continue to sell briskly, acclaimed for their brutal, unexpurgated candor about friends, family, lovers—and herself. But now, after a singularly unsuccessful stab at fiction, Cassandra believes she may have found the story that will enable her triumphant return to nonfiction. When Cassandra was a girl, growing up in a racially diverse middle-class neighborhood in Baltimore, her best friends were all black: elegant, privileged Donna; sharp, shrewd Tisha; wild and worldly Fatima. A fifth girl orbited their world—a shy, quiet, unobtrusive child named Calliope Jenkins—who, years later, would be accused of killing her infant son. Yet the boy's body was never found and Calliope's unrelenting silence on the subject forced a judge to jail her for contempt. For seven years, Calliope refused to speak and the court was finally forced to let her go. Cassandra believes...

The New York Times - Janet Maslin

Ms. Lippman makes good use of the way memoirists often choose sides in stories of divorce, and of how their idealizing and demonizing respective parents may be deeply wrong. But her greatest sleight of hand is the maneuvering that deftly compromises Cassandra as she reignites old emotions. Not until the end of Life Sentences…will the reader grasp how fully Ms. Lippman has shaped and controlled this narrative. Warts and all, Cassandra becomes a sufficiently sympathetic character to lure readers into making the same mistakes that she makes in excavating old truths.