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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dark, smart and violent, October 15, 2008
Dark, smart and violent, bestselling author Laura Lippman's first collection of short stories have a fascinating and sinister edge. HARDLY KNEW HER contains 16 tales and one novella, most told from the perspective of desperate and depressed women who find their sexuality to be both a liberating source of power and a confining detriment.
Lippman is an accomplished mystery and crime writer, and the stories here have her signature style, combining a journalistic voice with a highly charged emotional intensity (not to mention a scathing wit). In these selections there is usually a sad and cynical outcome, and even though, a few stories in, the resolution of each tale becomes familiar and predictable, each is entertaining and well-written.
Two stories center on Lippman's well-known character, private investigator Tess Monaghan. Another, as well as the novella, revolves around a former street-walker turned madame and suburban prostitute named Heloise. In "One True Love," Heloise's two lives collide when a john turns out to be the father of a boy on her own son's soccer team. She must figure out how to protect herself from the damage he could do to her legally, emotionally and physically, and she especially must protect her young son Scott. In "Scratch a Woman," Heloise's conflict is with her half-sister Meghan, an uptight and emotionally damaged suburban mom whose attempted murder of her husband is witnessed by her dangerous neighbor. In the Heloise portions of the book, we get a sense of what brought the sisters to these sad points in their lives, but the majority of the stories show us just acts of violence, and the moments before and after them.
In "The Crack Cocaine Diet," two young women try to buy cocaine in order to lose weight but end up murderers; in "Dear Penthouse Forum (A First Draft)," we meet a unique type of killer and are treated to a story within a story. In the title story, "Hardly Knew Her," 16-year-old Sofia wrests power from her abusive father, literally locking him out of her life. The male characters here are most often victimizers turned victim. One interesting exception is the young narrator of "Black-Eyed Susan," who is witness to the aftermath of a murder. While in many ways here the characters are one-dimensional and, for the most part, completely despicable, the stories are entertaining and wickedly fun.
Lippman's world is not for the faint of heart: it is full of prostitutes, handguns, unhappy marriages and blunt force trauma. Even though the violence is often, and the sex almost always, presented in a less than graphic manner, the acts are vivid; the details are less important than the mood she successfully creates.
By turns chilling, funny, heartbreaking and disturbing, HARDLY KNEW HER is an excellent foray into crime fiction that will thrill both Lippman fans and those who normally pass up on the genre.
--- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Laura, I salute your shorts!, November 19, 2008
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I read Lippman's book, What The Dead Know, and liked its originality, so I snapped up her book of short stories and, even though it's a totally different genre, hoped for the best. I wasn't disappointed!
The 16 shorts and a novella in Lippman's Hardly Knew Her are exceptional. I was convinced after reading these tales of murder that any ordinary soccer mom, or bored retiree, or devoted husband and father can easily be driven to homicide in a weak moment. What is so chilling about the situations in many of the stories, at least to me, is the feeling that I have met all these people before. They are not cackling madwomen, but my neighbors, my coworkers, my school friends....yikes. That is not to say that Lippman's stories themselves are ordinary - far from it.
Any one of these stories could be expanded into a full-length novel, but Lippman has pruned wisely, and carefully chosen every word to create smart noir in each of the tales. Well worth the time.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The female of the species, November 1, 2008
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The opening story, "The Crack Cocaine Diet," is a zinger. So perfectly does Lippman capture the ribald voice of the two best friends looking to score over their ex-boyfriends that she has you hooked within a few lines. And when the story takes a few unexpected turns, you are along for the ride, never mind the whiplash. This story, a mere 13 pages, is the first of a set collectively titled "Girls Gone Wild," and you quickly get the underlying idea: that the female of the species is deadlier than the male. So, in that sense, there is no suspense; all these stories end in crimes, and you have a pretty fair idea who will commit them. What keeps you reading is Lippman's inexhaustible ability to find variations, taking you with equal assurance into upscale suburban homes, decaying row-houses, and bachelor lofts, finding her protagonists among schoolgirls, soccer moms, and white-haired retirees. Half the pleasure of reading her stories comes from Lippman's pinpoint accuracy in penetrating different corners of the modern world.
Many of the stories are set in Baltimore, where I live, so there is also the pleasing shock of familiarity. A very few depend on local preoccupations, such as Preakness or the Orioles, and may be less immediate to outsiders. As if to compensate, there is a group entitled "Other Cities, Not My Own," set in places like New Orleans and Dublin, but the stories set on Lippman's home turf seem more deeply rooted psychologically as well.
With the exception of three stories featuring Lippman's private detective Tess Monaghan, which tend to deal with lesser crimes, most of the murders in this collection go undetected or unpunished. In most cases, indeed, they come under the category of justifiable homicides, at least in the minds of those who commit them -- and the reader's sympathy is seldom with the victims. If "victim" is even the right word, for many of these guys had it coming. For Lippman's greatest strength may be her ability to portray life through the eyes of her female characters, whether protective mothers, neglected wives, or downtrodden daughters. If something cracks one day and they exact revenge, it only demonstrates the inequality of relationships that men may take for granted. Yes, there are a few gloriously evil women in this collection, with few redeeming qualities other than their sheer audacity. But for the most part, these tales add up to a feminist view of life that is smart and sexy for sure, but also disturbingly true.
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