No Good Deeds: A Tess Monaghan Novel (Tess Monaghan Mysteries) [Hardcover]

Laura Lippman (Author)

Book Description

Series: Tess Monaghan Mysteries | Publication Date: June 27, 2006

When the body of Federal Attorney Gregory Youssef is found dumped on the edge of Baltimore, every law-enforcement officer in the city is determined to catch his killer. But four months on, no one has been brought to justice and the department is under massive pressure to deliver a suspect. Meanwhile, Tess' boyfriend, Crow, runs into a homeless black teenager and insists on helping him. He brings Lloyd home for some food and a bed for the night. When Tess mentions the Gregory Youssef case in his presence, Lloyd freezes. That night, Lloyd sneaks out of the house and disappears. What could be the link between Youssef's death and the teenager? Tess tracks Lloyd down and convinces him to share what he knows - which she then passes on to the press on the condition that Lloyd's name isn't used. But they use Tess' name instead ...The police start to put the screws on Tess to reveal her source, but to give them Lloyd's name would be equivalent to a death sentence - snitches aren't tolerated on the streets of Baltimore. Meanwhile Lloyd suddenly shows up at Crow's door. Another black teenager has been shot and it quickly emerges that Lloyd was the intended target. Lloyd has nowhere to run to and he certainly can't go to the police. Before long the situation spins wildly out of control, leaving Tess to fear not only for Lloyd, but also for those closest to her.

--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Smartly plotted and paced, Lippman's ninth Tess Monaghan novel (after By a Spider's Thread) opens with a somewhat unlikely scenario: Tess's boyfriend, Edgar "Crow" Ransome, brings home for the night a homeless teenager, Lloyd, who slashed Crow's tires outside a Baltimore soup kitchen. When PI Tess discovers that Lloyd has information regarding the recent murder of Assistant U.S. Attorney Gregory Youssef, Tess gives his story, sans name, to the local paper, so the authorities will get it secondhand. After a crony of Lloyd's is murdered instead of Lloyd, Tess receives her first visit from a sinister trio of law enforcement agents avid to know her source. Crow flees with Lloyd while Tess suffers growing pressure, including the threat of federal jail time. Baltimore itself is the book's most compelling character, its uneasy mix of aspiration and decay perfectly suited to Lippman's ironic voice. Crow is the book's weakest link; even a late revelation about his motives fails to make his sudden paternalism toward Lloyd believable. Happily, Lippman's loyal fans won't mind. Author tour. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

In Tess Monaghan's ninth outing, an impulse to do good leads to murder. When Crow Ransome, Tess' live-in boyfriend, catches 16-year-old Lloyd Jupiter running a tire scam on his car, he takes him home to ensure he has a place to sleep for the night. By accident, Tess discovers their reluctant guest has some intriguing information about the high-profile murder of a federal prosecutor. When Tess turns the information over to the papers, she's assured her source will be anonymous; not so Tess herself, however, and it isn't long before an aggressive assistant U.S. district attorney and two burly federal cops are knocking on her door. To protect the boy, Crow takes Lloyd away, leaving Tess to decide if increasing pressure from federal investigators is worth protecting a kid with a dubious sense of right and wrong. Lippman lets each character contribute a piece to the whole, which makes the story richer, and there's some nail-biting suspense as Tess faces off against what she thinks are the big guns of government. Stephanie Zvirin
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow; First Edition edition (June 27, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060570725
• ISBN-13: 978-0060570729
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,331,314 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Laura Lippman was a reporter for twenty years, including twelve years at The (Baltimore) Sun. She began writing novels while working fulltime and published seven books about "accidental PI" Tess Monaghan before leaving daily journalism in 2001. Her work has been awarded the Edgar ®, the Anthony, the Agatha, the Shamus, the Nero Wolfe, Gumshoe and Barry awards. She also has been nominated for other prizes in the crime fiction field, including the Hammett and the Macavity. She was the first-ever recipient of the Mayor's Prize for Literary Excellence and the first genre writer recognized as Author of the Year by the Maryland Library Association. Ms. Lippman grew up in Baltimore and attended city schools through ninth grade. After graduating from Wilde Lake High School in Columbia, Md., Ms. Lippman attended Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. Her other newspaper jobs included the Waco Tribune-Herald and the San Antonio Light. Ms. Lippman returned to Baltimore in 1989 and has lived there since.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars No Good Deeds is another hit for great author!, July 17, 2006

By 

Raymond M. Rose "Rainman" (Pottstown, PA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: No Good Deeds: A Tess Monaghan Novel (Tess Monaghan Mysteries) (Hardcover)

Laura Lippman is just not getting her due. When the bestseller shelves out there are plagued by hacks like Dan Brown and clones of his books, a great book like No Good Deeds is put on the New Hardback table for like a week then relegated to the shelf. Now, any self-respecting mystery fan doesn't even look at the bestseller wall or the New Hardback table. We go straight for the section and start browsing the shelf. Still, I would like to see Lippman reached by more than die-hard mystery fans.

She deserves to be read by everyone. And here's why:

1) Tess. As main characters go, she's a great heroine and a full-rounded character. This isn't some character (like Jack Ryan, for example) that's been in so many books that they've become rounded by no fault of the writer because they've had the guy do everything from analyst to Pope (joke there). Tess has been dynamic, exciting, puzzling, troubled, funny, and entertaining since the first book. It just happens that her characterization gets better with each book (we'll get to more of that later on).

2) Side characters. Like JK Rowling, Laura Lippman knows that readers love good side characters. Where would the Harry Potter books be without Ron and Hermione. Same can be said for Crow, Tyner, Kitty, Whitney (who I think I love a little), and other characters that I'm forgetting and I apologize. Laura gives us great, dynamic side characters to populate her world and they are a joy to come back to again and again. also, her addition of new characters in each book is great. Each character in No Good Deeds is spot on from the Feds to the eager-beaver district attorney to Lloyd.

3) Baltimore. Her city is the second main character. Like Lehane with Boston, Rankin with Edinburgh, and Pelecanos with DC, Baltimore is alive and well within her pages. As a true lover of the city, she brings Baltimore to you in all its highs and lows and its beauty and its ugliness. The city isn't just a setting but a living, breathing character. Also, she dives into the politics and the events that make a city a city. She isn't afraid to tell you what she thinks of what goes on in her city.

4) She Keeps Getting Better. Unlike other authors out there who we say, "Her/His first book was really good but the later ones just haven't been that great," Laura keeps getting better with each book. I thought By a Spider's Thread was the top of her game. In some ways for thrilling alone, it was. But No Good Deeds is even better in characterization and narrative thrust. This book starts and keeps cooking along, not wanting to let you go.

There. I've said why people should be reading Laura Lippman and not a lot of the crappy thrillers out there. I've said this before and I will keep on saying it, "Just because it's on the bestseller's list, doesn't mean it's good." Laura provides a great book every single damn time. Not every third book. No Good Deeds is a great book. Laura Lippman will not let you down.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "No Good Deeds" a masterful portrait of 'Smalltimore', February 17, 2007

By 

Jeannette Belliveau "Author, "An Amateur'... (Baltimore, MD United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: No Good Deeds: A Tess Monaghan Novel (Tess Monaghan Mysteries) (Hardcover)

As Laura Lippman notes on the second page of her latest mystery, "Tiny Town is, in fact, one of Baltimore's many nicknames -- along with Charm City and Mobtown -- and perhaps the most appropriate. Day in, day out, it's one degree of separation here in Smalltimore, an urban Mayberry where everyone knows everyone. Then you read the newspaper and rediscover that there are really two Baltimores. Rich and poor. White and black."

"No Good Deeds" shows what happens when these worlds intersect, as they do amazingly often. A teenager named Lloyd Jupiter knows more than he should about the murder of a U.S. attorney. News junkies will immediately recognize the real-life analog to the bizarre stabbing death of federal prosecutor Jonathan Luna, which Lippman acknowledges as her inspiration in an author's note.

Crow Ransome brings Lloyd home after catching him involved in a tire-slashing scam. His girlfriend, private investigator Tess Monaghan, finds the kid to be a bit shady, but turns his story over to the local paper. Publication of the information backfires, and those in charge of finding Luna's killers prove to have agendas of their own.

Lippman's latest mystery will delight not only her regular Tess Monaghan fans but perhaps a wider audience that really should include most fiction buyers in Baltimore and environs. (As further evidence of Lippman's observations about Smalltimore, a disclaimer: Laura and I worked for the same employer years ago.) Laura really captures not only the city but its leading newspaper (where only the biggest murders rate more than two paragraphs), as well as the city's police, and most of all Mobtown's underclass and their ingenuity in pursuing petty crime and grifting.

"No Good Deeds" is close to non-fiction in its accurate settings and observations of Baltimore. For Baltimore insiders, "No Good Deeds" will delight in many little touches, including a nice joke about the the Baltimore Four (either antiwar activists or Orioles pitchers, depending on context).

Lippman's books have always been entertaining and readable and she is steadily adding richness to her portrait of her hometown and surefootedness to her plotting. With every book Lippman gets closer to the real deal of daily life here, from the ups and downs of the Dunbar Poets to the crime wave around Canton Square. The twists and turns of the plot ultimately lead to a stronger ending to "No Good Deeds" than the conclusion of her next-best book (in my opinion), "Every Single Thing." She's edging closer to Tom Wolfe's territory in "Bonfire of the Vanities" and, along with the HBO series "The Wire," putting together a solid portrait of an intriguing city in dangerous times.

11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A gem!, July 8, 2006

By 

nobizinfla "nobizinfla" (Windermere, Florida USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: No Good Deeds: A Tess Monaghan Novel (Tess Monaghan Mysteries) (Hardcover)

Laura Lippman's ninth Tess Monaghan novel, "No Good Deeds", is an assured polished work.

It is finely crafted suspense populated with realistic characters that are worth caring about.

PI Tess Monaghan lands a consulting job with her former employer, Baltimore's Beacon Light.

The murder of a Federal prosecutor grabs Tess's attention. It starts out as an abstract example for journalistic investigation...but grows into much more.

Chance steps in when Tess's boy friend brings a scam artist/street kid home...the initial good deed. It turns out the kid (Lloyd Jupiter) is a link in the murder chain.

Wise enough to know he needs to remain invisible, Lloyd disappears.

During Tess's odyssey of discovery, much seems amiss with the official investigation. Protecting her source (Lloyd), Tess gives the paper as much as she knows...another good deed. This places Tess, her boy friend and Lloyd in jeopardy.

In peril from who is the question.

Tess's life is turned upside down by rogue agents from the FBI and DEA abetted by an ambitious Assistant US Attorney...revealing a wholly amoral world.

The tension builds steadily as the plot strands start to entwine in this notable and provocative novel.

"No Good Deeds" is entertaining and disturbing. Laura Lippman captures the allure of Baltimore in convincing fashion.

It starts strong and holds your attention.

Laura Lippman is the real deal...she writes with poise and flair...must reading!!!