Skip to main content

Book Review: After I'm Gone by Laura Lippman


When Felix Brewer skips town to avoid a prison sentence, he leaves behind a wife, Bambi, three daughters and a mistress, Julie. When the mistress disappears 10 years later, everyone assumes she went off to be with Felix. Then her body is found nearby. The police never manage to solve the murder case, but Sandy Sanchez, a former detective, decides to open the cold case about 20 years later and is determined to find the truth.

After I'm Gone by Laura Lippman is part crime novel, part family drama. Lippman covers several time frames throughout the novel, telling the story of Bambi and Felix, Julie and Felix, and Bambi and her daughters in the years after Felix's disappearance. We also get to know Sandy a bit, as well as other key characters. It sounds complicated, but it actually was easy to follow after the first few chapters.

I enjoyed the different characters, particularly the three daughters who are middle aged women by the end of the novel. It was interesting to read how their father's disappearance and his affair affected them, and how they related to one another and their mother over the years. The question of what really happened to Julie remained a mystery until it was revealed, as did the question of whether Felix Brewer would ever return to his family.

Overall, this was a good mystery with an engaging storyline that will keep you turning the pages until the end.

My Review: 4/5

Connect with Laura Lippman on her website, Facebook page or Twitter.

This review was written based on a copy of After I'm Gone that I received from TLC Book Tours in exchange for an honest review.
Labels:

Comments

  1. Heather J @ TLC Book ToursSeptember 5, 2014 at 8:15 PM

    I can't believe that I live near Baltimore and still haven't read anything by Lippman. I'm certainly missing out!

    Thanks for being a part of the tour.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. JulieSeptember 6, 2014 at 3:49 PM

      This was my first by her, but I will likely read another.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Thanks for stopping by! I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Popular posts from this blog

Getting back to blogging

It seems that blogging has dropped to the bottom of my list for the past year, and was pretty low for the year or two prior to that. I love to read, and am continuing to do so, but as my regular readers know I haven't been around much. My last blog post was almost a year ago!!

There are many things that have taken me away from blogging. Work has been much more challenging and interesting these past few years, but that means I really don't want to get back on the computer when I get home at night - or on the weekends.

Family life has been more busy with kids having multiple activities in the evenings, leaving little time to just hang out and write about the books that I read.

I will admit to a bit of a Facebook addiction, which means way too much time spent scrolling through my newsfeed instead of doing something more productive. This is one of the things I'm working on and hoping that this will free up some time for getting back to the blog.

Overall, life is good. Work is …
Post a Comment
Read more

Book Review: The Bookman's Tale by Charlie Lovett

Peter Byerly is distraught over the loss of his wife nine months ago. He has retreated to their cottage in the English countryside, hoping to return to his love of collecting and restoring rare books. But when he opens a book about Shakespeare forgeries and finds a Victorian watercolor of a woman who looks just like his wife, Peter is soon on a search for the origin of the painting and the truth about Shakespeare's real identity.

The Bookman's Tale: A Novel of Obsession by Charlie Lovett is a wonderful journey for anyone who loves books. It follows Peter's search in 1995, which turns into a bit of a thriller at times. But Lovett also takes the reader back in time a bit so we can learn the story of his relationship with his wife and how he came to be a bookseller. He does a beautiful job of expressing Peter's feelings about the rare books he encounters, and his feelings are contagious.

And then he takes us back even further to the history of one particular volume, whos…
3 comments
Read more

Banned Books Week: Junie B. Jones by Barbara Park

This is the end of Banned Books Week and unfortunately, I haven't had a lot of time to write about banned books this year. But I did want to include at least one post about it, so today I wanted to share one of the book series that it seems most people are surprised to find on the list: Junie B. Jones by Barbara Park.

According to Wikipedia:
The Junie B. Jones series came in at #71 on the American Library Association's list of the Top 100 Banned or Challenged Books from 2000-2009. Reasons cited are poor social values taught by the books and Junie B. Jones not being considered a good role model due to her mouthiness and bad spelling/grammar. This is an interesting example of a banned book. Many times there are serious, controversial topics featured in books that are challenged. Things like homosexuality, drugs, vulgar language, etc. You can actually understand why people may not want their children to read those books, and why they may challenge their inclusion in school libra…
10 comments
Read more