Another Thing to Fall
Perhaps an endnote to the novel holds the key to what went wrong – Lippman’s husband was a producer on the smash-hit series, The Wire, her inspiration for writing a novel about a television show that films in her home city.
The book starts well; feisty Tess Monaghan, private investigator, is out for her morning rowing session on the river, when she runs into a TV crew trying to catch the dawn light for a scene. After being inelegantly fished out of the water, she waits for her clothes to dry and watches the activity of director Flip Tumulty.
When Flip, son of a famous Baltimore-bred filmmaker, hears Tess is a PI, he hires her to guard the spoiled female starlet playing the lead. Strange things have been happening on the set, and the show ‘bible’ – the book that lays out the series – has been found among the possessions of a local man who committed suicide.
Lippman works hard at providing ‘insider views’ of the writers’ office, the production office, the budgetary constraints and the sets. Perhaps she strives too hard, because the story is rife with cliché. The names, the stars, the conniving, striving and the back-stabbing are not convincing.
The plot staggers along; the characters lack depth; the killer’s mindset and motive is hard to grasp, as is the reason for creating havoc for the TV producer and his series. To an extent, the novel is rescued by Lippman’s effortlessly good writing, and the characters of both Tess Monaghan and Mrs Blossom, her enormous, but somehow delicate and even talented student.
