Happy New Year!
It's almost 2007. Here is my last book review for 2006.

Tess Monaghan series by Laura Lippman

No Good Deeds
By A Spider's Thread
Last Place
In a Strange City
Sugar House
Book 4:
In Big Trouble ~ When Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan receives an envelope postmarked Boerne, Tex., containing a photo of Crow, her former musician boyfriend, and a scrap of newspaper headline reading "in big trouble," a day's outing to visit Crow's parents in Charlottesville which turns into a road trip to Texas. Tough and street savvy in her hometown, the former reporter feels lost in the land of the Alamo. Crow seems to have disappeared with a mysterious blonde singer, and as Tess searches for them, she encounters a wall of family secrets behind which may lie the reason for the body count rising around her.

Lippman does an excellent job at making you feel that you are in San Antonio and other Texas areas. As someone who lived in Houston for a few years I always feel rather nostalgic when it comes to books set in Texas. While feeling lost and lonely in Texas as nothing is familiar Tess quickly finds her niche there. She is a likeable character who I always enjoy reading her latest adventure

Book 3:
Butchers Hill ~ Tess Monaghan has finally made the move and hung out the shingle as a P.I.-for-hire, complete with an office in Butchers Hill. Her first client is Luther Beale, the notorious vigilante who five years ago shot a boy for vandalizing his car, just sprung from jail. He wants to make reparations to the kids who witnessed his crime for his own peace of mind, so he needs Tess to find them. But once she starts snooping, the witnesses she locates start dying. Is the "Butcher of Butchers Hill" as it again? Or is there another, even more sinister force at work?

She reluctantly accepts a 2nd case of a woman looking for her sister. Tess quickly finds out that there is no sister and the woman she is looking for is the woman's real idenity. Passing the test she is then assigned to find out what happened to a daughter she gave up for adoption 13 years before. Both cases overlap as Tess tries to discover the truth buried under all the lies.

This novel was inspired by a real-life Baltimore homicide, the story of a man who shot and killed a 13-year-old boy who had thrown rocks at his car. I find myself really liking this character with each book. We see how she is developing into herself. Lots of plot twists and I found myself wondering who was really the bad guy here.

Book 2:
Charm City ~ Business tycoon "Wink" Wynkowski is trying to bring pro basketball back to town, and everybody's rooting fro 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 Blight's editors, who thought they'd killed the piece. Instead, the piece killed Wink -- who's found in his garage with the car running.

Now the paper wants to nail the unknown computer hacker who planted the lethal story, and the assignment is right up the alley of a former newshound like Tess. But it doesn't take long for her to discover deeper, darker secrets, and to realize that this situation is really more about whacking than hacking.

We see more development of her relationship with several characters including her parents. We see more of Uncle Spike (who may not even be related to anyone) who has been found beaten to a pulp in his bar, leaving him in a coma. He left Tess his very bow-beaten greyhound who she finds herself nursing back to health.

The mystery is kind of not the most important thing as the person who ended up doing was kind of far fetched and I didn't see it coming. But I find myself wanting to know more about Tess and her friends and family. So I'll keep reading the next one.

Baltimore Blues ~ Introduces us to Tess Monaghan. Downsized ex-reporter Tess spends her days working part-time at the bookstore owned by sexy Aunt Kitty and rowing her mornings away and trying not to fall into the disgustingly polluted Patapsco from her city-owned boat. When rowing buddy Rocky pays her what looks like a fortune to follow his fiance, the trail leads to murder with Rocky the prime suspect.

What it leads to is another murder or someone very close to her and it becomes personal.

An interesting series and while it was slow to start it really ran the pace and finished better than it started. I liked her descriptions of Baltimore and of the newspaper industry. I'll read more of this series.