Prom Mom: A Thriller

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Joe meanwhile, seems to be living an idyllic life with his wife Meredith. She have a palatial home, which friends and neighbours constantly comment about, since there are no children to fill the house. But with Meredith running a successful plastic surgery business, and Joe building an empire based on retail parks, nothing seems likely to derail their relationship.

Prom Mom has a strong sense of place, transporting the reader to Baltimore with all its sights and sounds, and Lippman really captures the surreal, downright weirdness of Covid times. Her writing is so sharp, and she crafts the best characters – the morally gray, psychologically intense ones that you don’t like, but are completely fascinated by. She writes in the noir style, in prose that is straightforward and unemotional, but there is still so much depth to her stories and her characters. The timeline alternates between 1997 and 201/2020, through the beginnings of COVID. The setting also alternates between Baltimore and New Orleans. Both cities come alive, and each plays a central role in the plot. Pitch a book to me as a “feminist update of Rosemary’s Baby”, as Danielle Valentine’s Delicate Condition (Profile) is described, and I am very interested. Anna Alcott is a famous actor who is desperate to have a baby with her husband, Dex. She is in the middle of a gruelling IVF regime, but her medicines keep getting lost and her medical appointments move around. Once she does fall pregnant, she asks herself whether this confusion is just “pregnancy brain”. Then the ultrasound of Anna’s child is stolen and the doctors tell her she has lost her baby. Written while the author was pregnant with her first child, Delicate Condition is an indictment of how women are treated during pregnancy, dismissed and ignored, their pain overlooked. There is a subtle game of cat and mouse going on, but it is not clear who is playing and who is playing whom until the very end.From Part I BEFORE: 1997-2020, to Part II AFTER 2020-2021 with a final 1997. Told from Joe, Meredith, and Amber's POV, the three will collide for an explosive ending where nothing is as it appears, and everyone has their respective agenda. Mix in Jordan, a dangerous scheme, a murder, and secrets from the past are unraveled —EXPLOSIVE. Joe and Amber hadn’t been high-school sweethearts – she was tutoring him French when they’d become involved. And it’s clear each had wanted something quite different from the relationship. As a domestic suspense novel, this was dense with information. A slow burn with no empty words and a sinister gloss.

Yeah, my vibe’s gotten really dark. It happens that the book I’m working on right now is about a minor character from the Tess Monaghan series. I took this 68-year-old woman and put her on a cruise. I think of it as a mash-up of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E Frankweiler and Charade. It’s a sweet book, but of course it’s still a crime novel.Amber left town after the incident, while Joe stayed, marrying a beautiful and accomplished plastic surgeon named Meredith. They don't have children as agreed. Prom Mom is very much a character-driven novel. The characters all have secrets, tell lies, and are manipulative. Everyone has their own agendas, not all of them apparent.