What the Dead Know | 
| Author: Laura Lippman
Publisher: Harper
Category: Book
List Price: $7.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  102 reviews
Sales Rank: 3969
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 6.6 x 4.1 x 1.2
ISBN: 0061128864
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780061128868
ASIN: 0061128864
Publication Date: March 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Spine uncreased, binding tight. Pages bent from improper storage. Text unmarked.*Ships Next Business day*
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Product Description
Thirty years ago, the two Bethany sisters, ages 11 and 15, disappeared from a Baltimore shopping mall. They never returned, their bodies were never found, and only painful questions remain. How do you kidnap two girls from a busy mall on a Saturday afternoon without leaving behind a single clue or witness? Now, decades later, in the aftermath of a rush-hour hit-and-run accident, a clearly disoriented woman is claiming to be Heather, the younger Bethany sister. Not a shred of evidence supports her story, and every lead she reluctantly offers takes the police to another dead end—a dying, incoherent man; a razed house; a missing grave. But there is something she knows about that terrible day . . . and about a family that disintegrated long ago, torn apart by an unthinkable tragedy and the fissures it revealed in a seemingly perfect household.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 97 more reviews...
Sisters Together June 28, 2008
Laura Lippman's WHAT THE DEAD KNOWS is suspense that keeps you glued to the end excluding a sluggish beginning. The story is told from to perspective of each character who crosses the path of Sunny Bethany. But who is Sunny and what has been her convoluted life for 30 years since she and her sister never returned from the mall?
Based on an unsolved crime the story rings with both truth and fantasy. This is not a book to take to bed if you've got an early morning call. Find a day when you can disappear into the covers of a fine, well told story and start reading. It will be a day well spent.
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 Hard to see what the fuss is about June 12, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book has been ballyhooed as something great, but it is just a pedestrian suspense story with a fairly predictable twist. The writing itself is serviceable but nothing inherently pleasing.
 "World of epilogues" June 4, 2008
32 out of 36 found this review helpful
It was a parent's worst nightmare. Sunny and Heather Bethany disappeared from a Baltimore mall in 1975 and no real trace of them was ever found. Now thirty years later a disoriented woman walks away from a motor vehicle accident and claims to be one of the Bethany sisters.
Author Laura Lippman built a story spanning the thirty years, moving back and forth in time and bringing the characters to life. Sunny, fifteen, and Heather, eleven, are realistic and well-delineated. Their parents, Miriam and Dave, survive the loss in very different ways. The present-day mystery woman is abrupt and secretive, not likable and not easy to know. While two of the characters seemed to me to be somewhat stereotyped, the rest had the kind of realistic loose ends that only a good writer can create.
What the Dead Know feels like a novel rather than a suspense novel, if you care to make that distinction. There is a great deal of beautifully written back-story and some readers may think it's extraneous to the plot line, but the narrative conveys a vivid sense of time and place that is its own reward. The bonus I found in this book is the way Lippman wrapped it all together into a surpisingly well-supported ending.
Recently I've read several books in which the narrative moves back and forth along the time line of the story. I'm a little wary of that structure but Lippman handled it beautifully.
I listened to the unabridged CD version of this book and found the performance by Linda Emond to be very effective. While I prefer a book in print, this is one audio presentation I can recommend enthusiastically. I'll definitely be reading more from this fine writer.
Linda Bulger, 2008
Lovely May 23, 2008
I truly loved this book. I found it easy to follow, even through the flip flop of time, and when the twist at the end came, it felt like I should have known, but I did not see it coming. I thought it was a great suspense, and it just wet my appetite for more Laura Lippman.
superbly imagined May 21, 2008
We've all been haunted for a day or a week by some terrible story without an ending. I remember being riveted by the still-unsolved disappearance of those two young girls from a Baltimore mall in the 70s myself. Like most, I only guessed hesitantly at a nasty, brutish, short scenario for those children, a burial in swampland. As good at constructing a plot as she is at getting into people's heads, Lippman vividly imagines a twisty, but believable way to unravel the mystery that takes twenty years and more to play out. Only a writer as talented and connected to the scene as Lippman could imagine her way under the skins of so many people, over so much time. She is able to imagine what kind of person could emerge from the long crucible of abduction and abuse and loss of identity, and what kind of fates could befall the bereft parents, who have strongly different approaches to living with their losses. She's right, of course, that decades after such an incident, those harmed and involved will still be haunted. She's extraordinarily adept and luminous when she imagines the details of the haunting. For me this brilliance is best exemplified in a scene when the mother years later steps from the slummy, grey street-face of a Mexican hotel into its vividly gardenlike courtyard, where peacocks strut. She thinks of Dorothy's departure from colorless Kansas into technicolor Oz, and finds herself in tears remembering her children's ritual viewing of the movie each year. The classic American-ness of this image, the echo of the girls' disappearance from one world into another, the questions as to which world is heaven, which hell, explode out of this beautifully imagined moment. At the heart of Lippman's unusual and always-interesting writing are two deep wells of inspiration and obsession. Baltimore is Lippman's scene and inspiration. The city and its suburbs are her apt metaphor for America and our society--failed aspirations, faking it, cheesy possessions, wannabe imitations of the few 'aristocrats' who live unnatainably around the edges, anxious consumerism, mall architecture and interior decor all seem to defeat the capacity of her characters to be fully real to themselves and others. Her obsession is with the vulnerability of girls and very young women to their poorly formed ideas of self--which seem inevitably to lead them into disastrous circumstances. It's a miracle that some actually survive, and unsurprising that the survivors are damaged and damaging people. The unknowable survivor at the heart of this story remains opaque to the last, even when we know 'what really happened.' I don't think it is an accident that the girls' mother, Miriam, who displays quite a bit of self awareness and common sense, is a born Canadian. It's easier to enjoy Lippman's Tess Monaghan mysteries, which are lightened by more smart aleck humor and the heroine's ability to be a little outside the claustrophobic situations. But this novel, like her earlier novel, Every Secret Thing, explores and bravely imagines the mystery of human darkness at its heart so well that I'm constrained to say it's a better novel. Ordinary, naive girls do get caught up in extraordinary evil--and some of it is actually what they find within.
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