Charm City (Tess Monaghan Mysteries , #2) (Tess Monaghan) (Wheeler Large Print Books)

by Laura Lippman

It's murder in Baltimore these days - and Tess herself might be next on the list . . . From the author of LADY IN THE LAKE and SUNBURN
Winner of Edgar Award and Shamus Award

As a practised reporter until her newspaper went to that great pressroom in the sky, PI Tess Monaghan knows and loves every inch of her native Baltimore. It's a quirky city where baseball reigns, but lately homicide seems to be the second most popular local sport.

Business tycoon 'Wink' Wynkowski is trying to change all that by bringing pro basketball back to town, and everybody's rooting for him - until a devastating, muckraking expose of his lurid past appears on the front page of the BALTIMORE BEACON-LIGHT. It's a surprise even to the newspaper's editors, who thought they'd killed the piece. Instead, the piece killed Wink, who's found in his garage with the car running.

Tess is hired to find the unknown computer hacker who planted the lethal story - but it doesn't take long for her to discover deeper, darker secrets...

• ISBN10: 1587242141
• ISBN13: 9781587242144
• Publish Date: 1 May 2002 (first published 1 October 1997)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 13 March 2021
• Imprint: Wheeler Publishing
• Edition: Large type / large print edition
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 377
• Language: English

Reviews

[ibeforem]

This second book in the series made yet another enjoyable listen. Lippman manages to make Baltimore just as much a character as Tess or her Aunt Kitty. And Deborah Hazlett’s narration doesn’t hurt — her Baltimore accent is spot-on. Tess herself isn’t the greatest private investigator, which I guess is to be expected, since she hasn’t been one for very long. A lot of what she discovers is happenstance. But where she does excel is in talking to people, and it’s this ability to talk to everyone from an old lady in a poor part of town to a mafia thug to the rich (and more than a little crazy) ex-wife of the victim that pulls her forward. I liked the addition of Esskay, the greyhound that she takes custody of for her injured "uncle". Tess needed a little unconditional love in her life, especially since her love life remains a bit of a mess.

The only thing that was confusing to me was the game of Botticelli that Tess plays in an attempt to get her out of a jam. Not only did I not understand it based on the description in the book, I don’t even understand it after reading the Wikipedia article!