Book Review Robert Wiersema SUNBURN by Laura Lippman Sunburn, the new novel by New York Times bestseller Laura Lippman, is a page-turner of the highest order. It begins, however, in perhaps the most banal of settings: a “bar-slash-restaurant, the High-Ho,” 45 miles inland from the shore, in the sort of small town “where people are supposed to pass through” either on their way to the beach or on their way home. It’s not the sort of place where people stop. AdamBosk is at the bar, coolly evaluating an attractive young redhead with a sunburn. He flirts with her a bit and gets shot down, but he decides to stay in town anyway, taking a room at the Valley View motel across the street, just down from where the young woman is staying. The situation isn’t accidental; Bosk didn’t just happen to end up in Bellville. He’s no innocent barfly with a failed flirtation. He’s actually a private detective sent to track down the woman, who is calling herself Polly Costello. He hasn’t been sent by the husband she just left, though; Polly’s secrets go deeper than that. Bosk settles into a life in the town, getting a job in the kitchen at the High-Ho. Bosk is a patient man with a sterling reputation; he can spend some time observing her, getting to the bottom of why she’s stopped in town. He didn’t plan on getting close to her, however. He didn’t plan on falling in love. He doesn’t take those kinds of risks. After all, she’s already killed one man. Sunburn is a masterwork of storytelling, a hot, sweaty novel that’s part romance, part thriller, part mystery…all of the elements operating together like the gears in a watch. Both Bosk and Polly gradually emerge as fully rendered characters, utterly realistic with artfully revealed histories and motivations. Lippman, to her credit, doesn’t show her hand all at once. She doesn’t have cards up her sleeve, but the truths emerge slowly, naturally and to devastating effect. Best known as a mystery writer, in particular for the Tess Monaghan series, here Lippman fully embraces the conventions of noir fiction. This is a novel of secrets and lies, of hard truths and harder realizations. As the summer passes and Polly and Bosk grow closer, readers will feel the tension slowly tightening: someone is going to find out the secrets that they come to share and there will be violence. When it comes, though, the bloodshed has secrets of its own. There’s a body, yes, but has there been a murder or was the victim simply in the wrong place at the wrong time? The tension builds to a point that is almost unbearable, to a final scene in the very same bar which we entered in the novel’s first pages. By the time that climax comes, we think that we have all of the information, we think that we know how things are going to go. But Lippman still has one card to play and it changes the nature of the game once again, creating a finale that is at once inevitable but, simultaneously, jaw-droppingly surprising. Sunburn is a vivid, compelling, emotionally fraught novel filled with genuine peril and twists enough to satisfy even the most demanding of readers. It should come with a warning, however: this is the sort of book which you want to start when there’s plenty of daylight left, because you’re not going to be able to sleep until you finish. CSANews | FALL 2018 | 47
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