Review: Sunburn

Sunburn by Laura Lippman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What a pro. Not just Laura Lippman but also her protagonist Pauline “Polly” of-the-many-last names.

From the first few sentences here, we know we’re in good hands. Polly is lying low in a small Delaware town, and there’s something attractive about her – attractive in the metaphorical sense of beautiful but also in the explicit sense that she draws men to her.

That stamps her as a classic femme fatale, but she comes with an interesting 21st century twist. She’s been abused; she’s even had to kill her first husband in self-defense (or was it?).

Then, in a move that hasn’t worked for a lot of lesser writers I’ve read, she gives us alternative perspectives – most often from Adam who’s running from (or is it toward?) trouble of his own.

That’s enough of a set-up right there, a pair of compelling characters each with mysterious pasts.

(view spoiler)[But there’s more, of course. As the novel moves both forward and backwards in time, it becomes clear that Adam has been hired as a private detective to track Polly down after she has made substantial money from a pair of scams involving her first husband’s ex-partner. She’s clever and cold, like someone out of a James M. Cain novel – whose work is directly referenced.

The best part of this is its ultimate ambiguity. Polly has genuinely been abused. But did she really have to drug her husband and then stab him in the heart with a kitchen knife – and that after brushing up on anatomy so she’d know how to make the kill.

Adam owns up to loving her, and quits his job. But is he still manipulating her after he doesn’t admit that she was once his official quarry?

The end is a final, clever twist. When her second ex-husband arrives – stoked to anger by a Polly plot – he shoots Adam by mistake. And the story – which had seemed odd for being dated in the 1990s – jumps 20 years forward.

Polly has gotten away with it, all of it. She has the money, and everyone else associated with it is dead. The daughters she’d fought to take custody of – or did she? (she did abandon them both for a time) – have grown into impressive women. They live quietly in a small town. She’s happy.

Or is she?

This is a novel that never quite lets things rest. Polly has paid a high price for her happiness. Above all, she’s lost Adam, the seeming great love of her life. And the novel implicitly asks whether it was worth it. On a good day, the answer seems yes. But Polly, ambivalent as ever, has bad days, too. And, maybe, she’s a lot more sociopathic than her calm exterior suggests. (hide spoiler)]

This is good stuff from someone whose work is new to me, even as she is an established name. I’ll be looking for more.

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