The Diva Review:
I don't know where this book came from, but I found it in my bookcase and figured that I must have bought it for a reason. This happens to me a lot. I like to be well stocked. Sometimes I buy five or six books at a time, and then I forget which ones I ended up with. I'm usually happily surprised.
When I opened What the Dead Know, it gave me pause. I have a sister. I thought that a story about the disappearance of two little girls, sisters, might be really tough to read. But it wasn't. Lippman is an incredible writer with an absolutely amazing way of telling a story. She floats back and forth in time and location as easily as in a dream and has a true gift for building suspense.
As can be gleaned from the book's jacket, the story is about the abduction of two little girls from a crowded mall just before Easter 30 years before. Fortunately, that part is mostly told in retrospect. A woman with no ID gets into a minor car accident and when questioned, reveals that she is one of the missing girls. Lippman takes us through the current day's work to figure it all out through the eyes of the detectives, while expertly guiding us back and forth through the parents' grief, the aftermath of the abduction, snippets of the missing girl's life and then slowly, lets us in on what really happened.
I couldn't put it down. And when I finished, I thought about it for a good long time. To me, that is the mark of a really well written, well thought out book. Lippman treats the subject of child abduction and grief very sensitively and she twists it around to make it a really engrossing mystery/thriller.
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