Another Thing to Fall, the tenth book in Laura Lippman's Tess Monaghan crime series, is a pleasant read. A good tale - Hollywood, replete with its "characters" and "issues", comes to Baltimore where some of the locals are hostile and some of the crew begin dropping dead - and well told in Lippman's always pleasing, easy-going style.
It is charming and witty; it is affectionate towards a City I hold fond memories of - Memorial Stadium, Fort McHenry, the Inner Harbour and being taken on a (terrifying) tour in a police car by a cousin's vice cop husband; it has a well-constructed murder mystery plot that doesn't reveal itself until the end, when there is a neat twist. And it has Tess Monaghan, one of my favourite detectives.
But for all that I found it surprisingly and strangely unsatisfying.
At heart I think that is because I found it more or less impossible to have any real empathy for the characters (aside from Tess and Lloyd, her boyfriend Crow's protege who gets an internship on the production). Instead what we had was a small string of murders of unpleasant people worrying equally unpleasant people.
Allied to that was a lack of menace - at no stage did I feel that anyone I cared about was in any particular danger.
Another Thing to Fall revolves around the production of a period/time-traveller television drama set in Baltimore. The producer, Flip Tumulty, is the son of a famous local film-maker who has returned to his native City for what he hopes will be the type of success to allow him to escape his father's suffocating legacy. But the production is disrupted by strange goings-on such as set fires and demos by local activists, as well as the suicide of a man who has a number of photographs of the star of the show - Selene Waites - in his possession when he dies.
Tess is called in as a minder for Selene, a beautiful talented actress of the "Like, Uh!" generation who also has a talent for getting herself into trouble. And although this is demanding enough that she also has to involve her no-nonsense friend Whitney to baby-sit Selene, she also takes it upon herself to investigate the disturbances to the production.
It seems strange that Lippman ends up making the film/television world look so nasty and populated entirely by unprincipled, self-obsessed shits. It's not that I have any particular difficulty believing this might be the case, but given that Lippman is married to David Simon, producer of Homicide: Life of the Streets and The Wire (which just might be the greatest piece of television ever made) one might have expected a more sympathetic touch.
Laura Lippman is a fabulous novelist. The Tess Monaghan series is one of the best going - really, consistently good - and her standalone novels, including What the Dead Know and Every Secret Thing, which is truly top drawer, are excellent. And Another Thing to Fall is a decent enough book in many ways. But I guess I have come to expect to be bowled over by her books, and on this occasion I wasn't
