Mysteries: Three Novels of Domestic Suspense

Laura Lippman’s latest novel, “Prom Mom,” centers on Amber Glass, a Baltimore woman whose life has been scarred by events that occurred two decades ago. On the night of her school prom, Amber passed out in a hotel room and woke up alone with the lifeless body of the baby she’d just prematurely delivered. She was blamed for the infant’s death, served prison time and self-exiled to New Orleans. Now she’s returned to her suburban hometown to sell the old family house and open an art gallery.

What’s become of Joe Simpson, the “Cad Dad” who abandoned her that night to pursue another girl? Joe got married and became an ambitious real-estate broker. It doesn’t take him long to notice Amber’s new gallery, and to wonder: “If he could be a friend to her now—wouldn’t that be a kind of redemption?”

The timeline of “Prom Mom” toggles between the present and past as seen through different points of view. Readers’ sympathies shift from one character to another, as Ms. Lippman parcels out crucial information to induce gasps of surprise.

“If you wanted to have a future,” Amber reflects, “you had to let go of the past.” But what if your flaws and urges are so deeply ingrained that you’re condemned to repeat them? Ms. Lippman, long recognized as a master of plot and exposition, has been serving up psychologically rich slices of karma for years. Even her most demanding fans will be tempted to judge “Prom Mom” one of her best books yet.

Megan Abbott’s “Beware the Woman” takes romantic suspense to the far edge of melodrama. The book relates the travails of Jacy, a New York schoolteacher who marries an artist and then, on becoming pregnant, heads with him to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to visit his widowed father. She doesn’t know all that much about her spouse, Jed, but she’s happy to the point of superstition: “In some ways it felt like being this much in love—you had to hide it . . . You were tempting fate, or something.”

Jed seems reticent to return to the place where his mother died giving birth to him. He hasn’t been home in over 10 years. “We could turn around and go back,” he suggests on the drive, “explain it wasn’t a good time. Not with the baby coming.” But Jed then denies he’s said any such thing; he insists Jacy must have been dreaming.

Ms. Abbott’s storytelling talent is on fine display here. We’re gripped from the first page and soon in the spell of an enchantment. Like Jacy, we’re charmed by Jed’s retired father, Doctor Ash, a patrician gentleman eager to put his daughter-in-law at ease. But there’s tension between the doctor and his son, and a disturbing insularity to the remote community where he lives.

“People here, we don’t interfere,” the doctor’s taciturn caretaker explains. “We keep to ourselves. We mind our own business. . . . You could die, you see, and no one might ever know.” The creepiness intensifies during nine claustrophobic days and nights. Shocking family revelations bring an ominous sense of dread. Whether or not one is satisfied by the book’s bizarre denouement, Ms. Abbott has undeniably given us a story we’ll never forget.

“Bad, Bad Seymour Brown” by Susan Isaacs is the second entry of a series starring former FBI agent Corie Geller and her father, retired NYPD detective Dan Schottland. The titular Seymour Brown was a New York accountant who made his fame and fortune as a money launderer. He died, along with his wife, in an intentionally set house fire from which their five-year-old daughter, April, escaped.

Decades later, April, now a professor of film studies at Rutgers, asks Corie’s dad for help. She’s just survived what she’s sure was an attempt to kill her. Might this attack have something to do with her parents’ unsolved murders? Ex-detective Dan, who’s exchanged Christmas cards with April all these years, leaps at the chance to reexamine “the coldest of his cold cases.”

Both of Corie’s parents, in the wake of Covid, are living with her and her husband in Long Island. Having recently survived a kidnapping (see 2019’s “Takes One to Know One”), Corie is happy to co-direct the effort to deliver April from her past and present traumas.

“Getting people to talk is what I do best,” Corie claims. As a narrator, she herself is a formidable raconteur, as generous with details as Proust, as full of anecdote as a suburban Scheherazade. She and her father make a good team, pooling resources and pulling in a host of ex-colleagues and guest experts to assist them. They need all the help they can get to combat a most determined villain and save their brave and endearing client.