Review: ‘Hush Hush’ by Laura Lippman
February 22, 2015
In “Hush Hush,” the 12th of Laura Lippman’s bestselling Tess Monaghan mysteries, Tess is no longer the star of her own series. That honor now belongs to her daughter: a 3-year-old scene-stealer-in-pigtails named Carla Scout. Tess was pregnant with this usurper-in-utero in her last outing; now she’s a working mom, frantically trying to wedge her detecting gigs into the relentless daily round of mealtimes, meltdowns, playtimes and bedtime. These days, when Tess says she’s “packing,” she’s more likely to be referring to goldfish and Gummi bears than to a pistol.
The ways motherhood transforms women — for good and ill — are at the center of Tess’s investigations in “Hush Hush.” Her new client is a woman named Melisandre Harris Dawes, notorious around Baltimore because, on a hot summer’s day 12 years earlier, she left her 2-month-old daughter to die in a locked car while she sunbathed on the banks of the Patapsco River. Melisandre was found not guilty by reason of insanity. Now she’s back in town after many years living abroad, determined to reunite with her two older daughters, who have been living with their remarried father. More troubling: Melisandre wants to film this reunion for a documentary she’s bankrolling about her infamous case. Because Melisandre has been receiving anonymous “taunting” notes, she has hired Tess and her new partner, retired homicide detective Sandy Sanchez, to ensure her security.
To say that the strangely unperturbed (and gorgeous and wealthy) Melisandre gets under Tess’s skin would be an understatement. Here’s a brief, barbed exchange from their first meeting:
“Do you know what I am, Tess?”
“A woman with enough money to make a documentary about herself?”
“I’m every woman’s worst nightmare. Because whenever a woman kills her child, every other mother — at least every one who’s honest with herself — has a flash of sympathy. Not empathy. They don’t want to have done it, cannot imagine doing it. But they know.”
Let’s set aside the validity of Melisandre’s assertion for a moment and consider the strengths of “Hush Hush.” Lippman creates a complex suspense narrative that interweaves story lines about Tess’s harried home and professional life, Melisandre’s grandiose schemes to win back her daughters, and the damaged lives of those daughters themselves. Predictably, those nasty anonymous notes Melisandre has been receiving escalate until deadly violence erupts. Meanwhile, Tess has attracted a scribbling stalker of her own. In a hilarious and cringe-inducing scene, Tess stops into a neighborhood grocery with Carla Scout in tow to buy a well-earned bottle of wine — or, as Carla Scout dubs it, “Mommy juice.” A chip off the old block, the little girl then proceeds to throw a gale-force tantrum over a forbidden treat that she wants: a can of Pringles. When Tess finally wrestles her wailing daughter home, she discovers a disturbing note written on the back of the grocery store receipt: “YOU MAY HAVE GOTTEN A LICENSE TO BE A PI, BUT YOU’D NEVER GET ONE TO BE A MOTHER. YOU’RE A CRAPPY MOTHER.”
Everybody’s a critic, it seems, when it comes to motherhood. “Hush Hush” repeatedly hits the theme of parental guilt: Melisandre’s original sin of filicide and Tess’s maternal inadequacies are supplemented by her partner’s shame over institutionalizing his mentally compromised son and Tess’s beloved Aunt Kitty’s sadness — though not regret — about the baby she gave up for adoption long ago. Unfortunately, by universalizing the parental breast-beating, “Hush Hush” moves into the murky territory of moral relativism, coming close to endorsing that self-serving statement of Melisandre’s quoted above. In an effort not to condemn Melisandre for her abysmal maternal skills (why not?), Tess strains for meek messages of acceptance. “I can’t help thinking,” she tells her own mother at the end of the novel, “what a thin line separates good parents from bad parents.”
Are the homicidally negligent Melisandre and mundanely harried mothers like Tess really sisters under the skin? Is everybody really doing the best they can? “Hush Hush” is great fun to read for the introduction of Carla Scout, the new incarnation of working mom Tess, and for its lively suspense, but the pabulum it serves up about parenthood should have been left off the plate.
Maureen Corrigan, who is the book critic for the NPR program “Fresh Air,” teaches literature at Georgetown University.
HUSH HUSH
By Laura Lippman
Morrow. 303 pp. $26.99
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