Laura Lippman

Laura Lippman's new novel is Sunburn.

From her Q&A with Lloyd Sachs at the Chicago Tribune:

Q: One of the most impressive things about "Sunburn" is that for all its cutting touches, all of the characters are afforded a level of understanding you don't often find in this kind of novel.

A: That human scale wasn't there in an early version. A good friend who read it when I was midway through said to me, "That's not you. That's not the kind of book you write." And I knew that wasn't the kind of book that interests me as a reader.

Q: What led to you to take on noir after all these years as a novelist?

A: I had read Anne Tyler's "Ladder of Years," a dark, cathartic fantasy in which a woman escapes her unhappy family life and spends time alone, in her own house, for a long period of time. And I thought that could be a noir story: What if the person passing through town is a woman? I didn't want to write about the present day, but a time when it was easier to disappear. So I set it in 1995, before...[read on]

Visit Laura Lippman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue