In a Strange City: A Tess Monaghan Novel
Laura Lippman
Language: English
Pages: 416
ISBN: 0062070878
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
New York Times bestselling author Laura Lippman’s Tess Monaghan must put her PI skills to the ultimate test when she falls into the crosshairs of a psychopath who knows everything about her.
For the past fifty years on the birth date of Edgar Allan Poe, a person wearing a cloak has placed three roses and a half bottle of cognac on the writer’s gravesite. PI Tess Monaghan has never witnessed the event. But when John P. Kennedy, an eccentric antiques dealer, asks her to uncover the identity of the caped visitor, who he believes has duped him with the sale of an inauthentic antique, Tess decides to hold vigil on the night the cloaked stranger is expected to make an appearance. But the custom takes on a bizarre, fatal twist when two cloaked figures arrive. The imitator leaves his tribute and then makes his escape…after shooting the first visitor.
Warning bells tell Tess to steer clear of this case. But when roses and cognac appear on her doorstep, Tess’s curiosity is piqued. She soon discovers that John P. Kennedy has vanished into thin air and much of what he told her was questionable. Then the identity of the shooting victim comes to light, and all clues seem to point to the possibility he was the target of a hate crime. But Tess isn’t convinced. What was his connection to the decades-long Edgar Allan Poe tradition and to the killer? When more cryptic clues are left at her home, Tess realizes that someone is watching her every move...someone who’s bent on killing again.
six-forty-five, she was ready to get out her cell phone and tell Whitney to abort when she saw a tall figure coming toward her, up the steps that led from the law school construction site. The man’s head was down, but he held his hands to his mouth in a gesture she remembered. He glanced at her, slowed his stride for a few steps, and then his gait quickened again. He was rushing, trying to get by her without breaking into an out-and-out run. “Wait,” Tess called out. “Please wait. I must speak to
wasn’t enough. You can take the starch out of the collar”—Tess was sure that collar was not Sandy’s first choice, but he had a touching, old-school gallantry—“but you can’t take the impulse away. It’s always there. So this lady—is she medicated these days? Forget medicated. Has she been sterilized? What if—” “I don’t know, Sandy. I have trouble with the idea of forced sterilization under any circumstances. And that’s one part of the female reproductive system the ultraconservatives haven’t tried
noted he had been beaten quite badly, with a bat or something else made from wood, but the weapon had never been found. The burglaries seemed to have nothing in common with the attack or with each other. One was in Bolton Hill, the home of Jerold Ensor, who sounded vaguely like someone she should know about, one of those names that crop up on donor lists and the society pages. The other was a name of no resonance, Arnold Pitts, at an address that didn’t register: Field Street. She had seen that
antique wonders. Or so it appeared from Tess’s vantage point in the foyer, where she had been asked to wait fifteen minutes ago by the housekeeper who had answered her insistent ring. It wasn’t clear if she was being made to wait or if she had been forgotten completely. Left with nothing else to do, Tess stared at herself in a huge ornate mirror—a mirror that had hung, according to a three-by-five card pinned next to it, in the room where Francis Scott Key had died. She wondered how such a piece
happened while she slept, only that she awoke each morning feeling unsettled and hung over with fear. “Gretchen?” Tess muttered, her mouth pressed into the old-fashioned black receiver, so much harder and more solid than modern phones. Trust Crow to have a phone that had to be dialed, with a mechanism so tight the puny Touch-Tone-trained finger was barely up to the task. “I know I said I’m a morning person, but anything before sunrise is a little extreme.” “You’ll want to see this,” Gretchen