Every Secret Thing, by Laura Lippman. William Morrow. $24.95. 388 pages.
Laura Lippman, author of the Tess Monaghan series (Charm City, Baltimore Blues), has won every prestigious American mystery award: the Edgar, Agatha, Shamus, Anthony and Nero Wolfe. Her latest foray into mystery and crime introduces a new detective, Nancy Porter (formerly Potrcurzski, a cop from a family of cops with a fed for a husband) and a much darker vision, both of which will no doubt earn another round of accolades.
Lippman, who spent 15 years as a reporter at The Sun, traverses territory she knows well, Baltimore City and Baltimore County, while also covering the permutations of race, class and politics that so infuse both places. Every Secret Thing begins seven years ago on a hot July afternoon at a birthday party attended by 12 fifth-grade girls. The invisible yet monolithic barriers of class and breeding have begun to separate two of the 11-year-olds, Alice Manning and Ronnie Fuller, from their companions, private-school girls with money.
An incident at the party causes Ronnie to be ejected, and, with her, Alice. The two trudge home in their bathing suits, towels wrapped around their middles, heading from the elite swim club to their grim little houses off Route 40. On the way they detour, however, discovering a chic baby carriage abandoned, baby inside, on the porch of an upscale house.
Angry at being sent home from the party for being bad, they are both eager to do good. Even 11-year-old girls know babies should not be left alone in carriages in sweltering July heat. They take the baby, imagining grateful parents and even a reward. But several days later Olivia Poole Barnes, 8 months old and colicky, is found dead in Leakin Park.
Olivia was the only child of Cynthia and Warren Poole, a wealthy young African-American couple with close connections to the city's judicial and political systems. Alice and Ronnie are not tried as adults, despite Cynthia's deep desire for vengeful retribution for the death of her baby ("If two black girls killed a white baby ...").
The girls get sent away for several times the standard sentence for children so young, until they turn 18. But when they return home, Alice to her ultra-hip yet unsuccessful single mother, Helen, and Ronnie to her semi-violent working-class household with the pilfering truck-driver father, worn-down mother and sexually predacious brother, their individual experiences of incarceration begin to infuse and confuse their daily lives.
A series of semi-abductions of 3-year-old girls of the same physical description as Cynthia Poole's second child, Rosalind, go unremarked until one little girl goes missing from the Westview Mall. Cynthia Poole believes Alice and Ronnie have abducted another child. Alice's public defender, Sharon Kerpelman, believes Poole is still out for revenge against Kerpelman's former client. Mira Jenkins, an eager young reporter at the Beacon-Light, gets anonymous tips. Nancy Porter finds herself on a case that reverberates through her whole career. And the clock ticks out on yet another baby's life.
Lippman's tale is superbly paced, weaving story and building suspense to the series of shocks that lead to the novel's finale. She tells her story from multiple vantage points - and well - disallowing the reader any opportunity to form alliances until book's end. (Baltimoreans will relish insiderish elements of the story.)
Every Secret Thing is not just a mystery but a tragedy, a novel about women's lives and about whether forgiveness can ever truly be granted. A dark turn for Lippman, but a grimly satisfying read that illumines one of our deepest fears as a modern society: that children may not be innocents after all.
Victoria A. Brownworth, author of numerous books, has edited several mystery anthologies, including the award-winning Night Bites as well as the Out for Blood series of women and suspense stories. She teaches writing at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, the nation's largest college for the creative and performing arts.
