The award-winning master of psychological suspense is in top form in this collection of diverse and diabolically clever stories - including one never-before-published novella. These brilliantly crafted stories of deception, murder, dangerous games, and love gone wrong - irrefutable evidence that Laura Lippman's riveting fiction will more than satisfy any crime reader. "In a suspenseful collection of stories featuring fierce women--including one never-before-published...

Tess Monaghan gets a newspaper photograph of her old boyfriend, accompanied by the headline "In Big Trouble." The answers lie far from Baltimore, deep in a world of good-time music, ambition, and rich people's games. Tess must find out what happened to a man she thought she knew, to a woman who may have changed him forever, and to the victims of a killer.

"Mark Rubin's family is missing - and the police won't get involved because all the evidence indicates that his wife left willingly. So the successful Baltimore furrier turns to Tess Monaghan, hoping she can help him find his wife and three children. Tess doesn't quite know what to make of Rubin, who doles out vitally important information in grudging dribs and drabs. According to her client, he and his beautiful wife, Natalie, had a flawless, happy...

For Tess Monaghan, the unsolved murder of a young federal prosecutor is nothing more than a theoretical problem, one of several cases to be deconstructed in her new gig as a consultant to the local newspaper. But then her boyfriend brings home a street kid who doesn't even realize he holds an important key to the man's death. Tess agrees to protect the boy's identity no matter what, especially when one of his friends is killed in an apparent case...

Tess Monaghan agrees to look into a series of unsolved homicides that date back over the past six years despite the fact that the assignment originates from a troubling source: wealthy Baltimore benefactor Luisa O'Neal, who was both instrumental in launching Tess's present career and intimately connected with the murder of Tess's former boyfriend. Apart from the suspicion that each death was the result of domestic violence, nothing else seems to connect...

Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan becomes dangerously involved in the investigation of the murder of the Visitor, a Baltimore ritual in which an unknown person leaves roses and a half bottle of cognac on Edgar Allan Poe's grave every January 19th.