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"Powerful....A gripping tale that is a mystery only in the same sense as To Kill a Mockingbird was....Brilliant, insightful, moving." --Chicago Sun-Times There are excellent reasons why New York Times bestselling author Laura Lippman has won the Edgar®, Agatha, Anthony, Nero Wolfe, and every other major award the mystery genre has to offer. To the Power of Three is just one of those reasons. Lippman's brilliant and disturbing tale of three inseparable high school girlfriends in an affluent Baltimore suburb who share dark secrets literally until death, To the Power of Three is this "writing powerhouse" (USA Today), who has "exploded the boundaries of the mystery genre to become one of the most significant social realists of our time" (Madison Smartt Bell) operating at the very top of her game. Not merely crime fiction, but fiction that gets to the deep psychological, emotional, and human roots of a terrible crime, Lippman's novel is one that will not be easily forgotten--a must read for fans of Kate Atkinson, Tana French, Jodi Picoult, and Harlan Coben… (more)
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Josie, Perri and Kat are best friends.
I absolutely could not put this book down, I
After What the Dead Know, I was excited to read
But the evidence doesn't add up: why are there bloody footprints leading away from the locked door? Where are Josie's shoes? Where are all three girls' cell phones?
The book bounces all over place and time, between different POVs, delving deep into each one, showing the development of the girls' friendship until a year earlier when there's an abrupt break between Perri and Kat. And despite the nonlinear progression of the story, it works, for the most part, because the psychological suspense is high and the characters are realistic and familiar (at least to anyone who is, has, or has been a teenage girl).
My only problems were first, that there were a few too many characters, too many POVs. I didn't see a lot of point to teacher Alexa Cunningham's POV, for example--her scenes were very in-depth, but she seemed to be only peripherally involved, if at all, in the events leading up to the shooting.
And then there was the ending. I don't want to spoil it, but it felt flat and anticlimactic. And maybe that was the point--that life doesn't always have a dramatic point. I can accept that--it just doesn't make me love the book.
Overall, I loved the feel of the book: that somewhat dream-hazed, suspenseful, close-up portraits of how 3 teenage girls ended up dead or wounded. If it had been a movie, it would be an artsy one, with lots of out-of-focus close-ups. It's different from my usual reading, which is always a good thing, and I was really immersed in it up until nearly the very end.
David Simon. Now I know you cannot assume one spouse’s talent in an area matches the other (e.g., Dave Navarro and Carmen Electra; Roseanne and Tom Arnold; Whitney and Bobby; Ricky and Lucy Ricardo). But frequently they are in the same league: James Carville and Mary Matalin; Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins; Kurt and Courtney? (But I for one think Live Through This is brilliant and I do not think Kurt wrote it. Sexist!)
I digress.
Based on the reading of this one book, Lippman is not in her husband’s league. It is not a bad book, not at all. I turned the pages very quickly. I wanted to know whodunnit and why. It’s just that after years of reading mysteries with literary aspirations and literary fiction that deals in clues and bodies, a straight genre mystery/thriller seems flat. The characters could have come from Central Casting; they had very few insights; they didn’t view the world through apt and original metaphors; and I won’t remember any of their names next week.
I don’t regret the experience, but I’ll be looking for new mystery writing elsewhere.
Review: This really looks at interactions among girls and their friends and rivals. It also pulls