Charm City

Description

As a practised reporter until her newspaper went to that great pressroom in the sky, PI Tess Monaghan knows and loves every inch of her native Baltimore. It's a quirky city where baseball reigns, but lately homicide seems to be the second most popular local sport. Business tycoon 'Wink' Wynkowski is trying to change all that by bringing pro basketball back to town, and everybody's rooting for him - until a devastating, muckraking expose of his lurid past appears on the front page of the BALTIMORE BEACON-LIGHT. It's a surprise even to the newspaper's editors, who thought they'd killed the piece. Instead, the piece killed Wink, who's found in his garage with the car running. Tess is hired to find the unknown computer hacker who planted the lethal story - but it doesn't take long for her to discover deeper, darker secrets...

Laura Lippman is a reporter and lives in Baltimore. Her Tess Monaghan novels have won numerous awards, including the Shamus, the Edgar, the Anthony and the Agatha awards.

Lippman is a writing powerhouse * USA TODAY * Every time Laura Lippman comes out with a new book, I get chills because I know I am back in the hands of the master. She is simply a brilliant novelist, an unflinching chronicler of life in America right now -- Gillian Flynn A force to be reckoned with in crime fiction * PUBLISHERS WEEKLY * Laura Lippman is among the select group of novelists who have invigorated the crime fiction arena with smart, innovative, and exciting work -- George Pelecanos Laura Lippman continues to push the envelope of modern crime-writing -- Harlan Coben [Lippman] only seems to be getting better * ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY * One of the best novelists around, period * WASHINGTON POST * One of the most polished and consistently interesting writers of detective fiction today * THE ECONOMIST *