Easy as A-B-C

By Laura Lippman

A trade paperback collection of 16 short stories, some new, some published before, all together for the first time, featuring Tess Monaghan, New York Times Bestselling author Laura Lippman’s acclaimed private eye

For the first time together in one collection is a mix of brand new Tess Monaghan short mysteries as well as previously published, award-winning short stories.

Split into three parts—Girls Gone Wild (seven stories about girls behaving badly); Other Cities, Not My Own (four stories about places outside of Baltimore); My Baby Walks the Streets of Baltimore (four stories and a profile)—the inimitable Tess Monaghan, along with some old friends and new faces, is back solving crime.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Feb 3, 2009
• ISBN: 9780061846090

Laura Lippman

Since Laura Lippman’s debut, she has been recognized as a distinctive voice in mystery fiction and named one of the “essential” crime writers of the last 100 years. Stephen King called her “special, even extraordinary,” and Gillian Flynn wrote, “She is simply a brilliant novelist.” Her books have won most of the major awards in her field and been translated into more than twenty-five languages. She lives in Baltimore and New Orleans with her teenager.

Book preview

Easy as A-B-C

From the Short Story Collection

Hardly Knew Her

Laura Lippman

Contents

Begin Reading Easy as A-B-C

About the Author

Books by Laura Lippman

Copyright

About the Publisher

EASY AS A-B-C

Another house collapsed today. It happens more and more, especially with all the wetback crews out there. Don’t get me wrong. I use guys from Mexico and Central America, too, and they’re great workers, especially when it comes to landscaping. But some other contractors aren’t as particular as I am. They hire the cheapest help they can get and the cheapest comes pretty high, especially when you’re excavating a basement, which has become one of the hot fixes around here. It’s not enough, I guess, to get the three-story rowhouse with four bedrooms, gut it from top to bottom, creating open, airy kitchens where grandmothers once smoked the wallpaper with bacon grease and sour beef, or carve master bath suites in the tiny middle rooms that the youngest kids always got stuck with. No, these people have to have the full family room, too, which means digging down into the old dirt basements, putting in