By a Spider's Thread
From AwardAnnals
| Book: | By a Spider's Thread |
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| Author: | Laura Lippman |
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| Publisher: | William Morrow |
Mark Rubin’s family is missing—and the police can’t do a thing because all the evidence indicates that his wife left willingly. So the successful furrier turns to Tess Monaghan, hoping she can help him find his wife and three children. Tess doesn’t know quite what to make of Rubin, a wealthy Orthodox Jew who refuses to shake her hand and doles out vitally important information in grudging dribs and drabs. According to her client, he and his beautiful wife, Natalie, had a flawless, happy marriage. Yet one day, without any warning or explanation, Natalie gathered up their children and vanished.
Tapping into a network of fellow investigators spread across the country, Tess is soon able to locate the runaway wife and her stolen progeny, moving furtively from state to state, town to town. But the Rubins are not alone. A man is traveling with them, a stranger described by witnesses as “handsome” and “charming” but otherwise unremarkable to these casual observers, who have no way of sensing the fury beneath his smooth surface.
The motive behind Natalie’s reckless flight lies somewhere in the gap between what Mark Rubin will not say and what he refuses to believe. An intricate web of betrayal and vengeance is already beginning to unravel, as memory begets rage and rage leads to desperation—and murder. And suddenly much more than one man’s future happiness and stubborn pride are in peril; the lives of three innocent children are dangling by the slenderest of threads.
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Reviews
Barnes and Noble
Following her triumphant venture into stand-alone suspense with Every Secret Thing, Laura Lippman returns to her award-winning Tess Monaghan mystery series.
Although private investigator Tess Monaghan hates matrimonial cases, she hates the idea of being bankrupt even more, so she agrees to look for Mark Rubin’s missing family. As far as the police are concerned, there is no sign of foul play. Natalie Rubin simply took her three children and vanished. At first Tess is inclined to agree. While Mark can’t imagine why Natalie wasn’t happy as the wife of a wealthy furrier, Tess can see plenty of reasons why the woman might have found her marriage suffocating. Natalie had been married young, to a man 12 years her senior. Although her husband didn’t limit his beautiful wife’s spending, she was expected to account for every penny. And though she’d been raised a secular Jew, Mark admits that he wouldn’t have married her if she hadn’t agreed to embrace the tenets of Orthodoxy.
As Tess digs deeper into the circumstances surrounding Natalie’s disappearance, she discovers that Mark has concealed many things, including the fact that he met Natalie while volunteering as a visitor in the prison where Natalie’s father is still serving out a sentence for murder—and that Natalie has been blackmailed by her father in the past. Battling her client for the information she desperately needs, Tess has two allies: an online network of women investigators and Mark’s nine-year-old son, who is determined to reunite his family. But even Mark doesn’t know that painful secrets he’s concealed about his own family are about to explode violently. By a Spider’s Thread is a very strong book with no holds barred when it comes to plot or emotion. —Sue Stone
