Laura Lippman

New York Times bestselling author Laura Lippman is hailed as a distinctive voice in mystery fiction. Best known for writing a series of novels set in Baltimore and featuring reporter-turned-private investigator Tess Monaghan, Lippman’s books have won most of the significant honors in her field, including the Agatha, Anthony, and Edgar Allan Poe Award. In Dream Girl: A Novel (William Morrow), writer Gerry Andersen, injured in a freak fall, is confined to a hospital bed in his high-rise apartment and dependent on two women he barely knows: his incurious young assistant and a dull, slow-witted night nurse. Then late one night the phone rings – and the caller claims to be the “real” Aubrey, the title character from Andersen’s most successful novel, Dream Girl. But there is no “real” Aubrey; she’s a figment of his imagination. Isolated from the world, drowsy from medication, Andersen slips between reality and a dreamlike state in which his past haunts him – and now, here is Aubrey, threatening to visit him and suggesting that he owes her something. The Washington Post noted that “Socially conscious (the #MeToo movement makes a decisive entrance into the plot) and packed with humor, ghosts and narrative turn of the screw, Lippman’s Dream Girl is indeed a dream of a novel for suspense lovers and fans of literary satire alike.”