The Sugar House

Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author Laura Lippman’s Tess Monaghan—first introduced in the classicBaltimore Blues—finds herself working a homicide case filled with the most baffling twists and turns.

Baltimore local Tess Monaghan thought she knew the Sugar House—the long-standing factory that dominates the city’s skyline —until a client named Ruthie asks the newspaperwoman-turned-p.i. to investigate a year-old “Jane Doe” murder and its grim aftermath. Ruthie’s low-life brother, Henry, confessed to killing a teenage runaway over a bottle of glue. A month into his prison term, met the same fate as his victim, whose identify has never been established. If Ruthie knows who her brother killed, maybe she’ll also know why he died

With only a few clues to guide her, Tess’s hunt for the truth takes her from Baltimore’s exclusive Inner Harbor to the city’s seediest neighborhoods and into the halls of the State House. And when the supposedly solved murder case turns up newer, fresher corpses, Tess learns that there are all kinds of Sugar Houses.