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    What the Dead Know
    What the Dead Know
    What the Dead Know
    Audiobook10 hours

    What the Dead Know

    Written by Laura Lippman

    Narrated by Linda Emond

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Thirty years ago two sisters disappeared from a shopping mall. Their bodies were never found and those familiar with the case have always been tortured by these questions: How do you kidnap two girls? Who'or what'could have lured the two sisters away from a busy mall on a Saturday afternoon without leaving behind a single clue or witness?

    Now a clearly disoriented woman involved in a rush-hour hit-and-run claims to be the younger of the long-gone Bethany sisters. But her involuntary admission and subsequent attempt to stonewall investigators only deepens the mystery. Where has she been, why has she waited so long to come forward? Could her abductor truly be a beloved Baltimore cop? There isn't a shred of evidence to support her story, and every lead she gives the police seems to be another dead-end'a dying, incoherent man, a razed house, a missing grave, and a family that disintegrated long ago, torn apart not only by the crime but by the fissures the tragedy revealed in what appeared to be the perfect household.

    In a story that moves back and forth across the decades, there is only one person who dares to be skeptical of a woman who wants to claim the identity of one Bethany sister without revealing the fate of the other. Will he be able to discover the truth?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateMar 13, 2007
    ISBN9780061435171
    What the Dead Know
    Author

    Laura Lippman

    Since Laura Lippman’s debut, she has been recognized as a distinctive voice in mystery fiction and named one of the “essential” crime writers of the last 100 years. Stephen King called her “special, even extraordinary,” and Gillian Flynn wrote, “She is simply a brilliant novelist.” Her books have won most of the major awards in her field and been translated into more than twenty-five languages. She lives in Baltimore and New Orleans with her teenager.

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    Reviews for What the Dead Know

    3.5/5

    956 ratings84 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A pretty good story. Unusual story line. Good characters.
    • 5/5
      Couldn't put this book down!!!
    • 5/5
      What a wonderful writer! I loved this story, and was hooked from beginning to end. I'm not keen on this idea of putting music in audiobooks though. It's irritating and always makes me jump.
    • 4/5
      In What the Dead Know, two sisters disappear from a local mall one afternoon. Thirty years later, a woman claims to be one of the sisters. The story is told in alternating timelines of past and present and from alternating characters viewpoints. This is a sad story, but lyrical in its telling. In the end, we see how a single event spreads ripples further and further from the center, affecting a great many lives in the process.
    • 4/5
      Lippman writes a mystery that will stay with you long after you have finished the last page. This story starts wtih a hit-and-run car accident, the perpetrator claiming in her dazed confusion she is one of the Bethany girls, girls who went missing years and years ago from a mall not too far from the scene of the accident. Is she who she claims to be? The detectives aren't sure, but she does know something about the abduction. Although none of the characters will earn your sympathy, necessarily, Lippman draws them in an authentic way that will make you want to know how their stories resolve. Recommended for those who like mysteries with more than just plot.
    • 5/5
      It was really good kind of confusing and that music they mixed in was so distracting lol
    • 5/5
      Another read-all-night book by the gifted Lippman. Her journalistic skills and her literary skills combine to tell another gritty, breath-taking tale that draws the reader into the experiences.
    • 4/5
      One of those five-path books that lets you see the kid victims, the detective, the grieving parents, one's out of bounds romps, the past, the present, mostly in or around Baltimore. The first half works, then it bogs down. The stories get too tedious, the victim's trauma wears you down. But a worthy write. I foured it.
    • 4/5
      This is a very well written book. It contains a lot of heartache and sadness. while reading I could not decide who the woman actually was. However, the ending was one I had not considered.
    • 4/5
      Synopsis: A cold case file is suddenly opened when one of two girls who are supposed to be dead some 30 years is found alive. However, it is not clear whether she's really one of the girls or a well-prepared pretender.Review: This is actually a pretty chilling book about kidnapping, murder and abuse.
    • 5/5
      Great psychological thriller. I couldn't put it down once I started it. I tried several times but kept going back to it. Not normally my kind of book but I really got invested in this one. New author to me.
    • 3/5
      I did t like it as well as some of her others books, it is was good!!
    • 4/5
      In 1970s Baltimore, two sisters aged 12 and 15 go missing. More than 30 years later, a woman shows up who claims to be one of the missing girls, long presumed dead. But is she really who she claims to be? And if she isn't, what kind of dangerous game is she playing?The woman who now claims to be Heather Bethany is established early on as an unreliable narrator in the segments of this book told from her point of view. Balancing that are chapters seen through the eyes of the main police detective investigating her claims, as well as other characters drawn into her orbit. Lippman also goes back to the scene of the crime, so to speak, to show us the girls' lives leading up to their disappearance, as well as how her parents cope or fail to cope in the aftermath. All of the characters through whose eyes we see the story seem legitimate and sympathetic in their own way, and I never had the experience I so often have with multiple-viewpoints narratives of becoming impatient with one or more of the POVs and rushing through those chapters to get back to the "good stuff".Two things kept me from rating this otherwise imaginative and well-written book higher. The machination that Lippman employs to avoid having the identity secret solved too soon seems unlikely in the extreme, and the ultimate reveal that seemed fairly obvious to me as a reader (which is fine) seemed to never occur to the professional investigators (not so fine). I get that Lippman wanted to maintain the element of shocking surprise as long as possible, but it just made her otherwise savvy characters seem stupid.This is the first book I've read by Lippman, and I found it rewarding enough to want to read more. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that for a long time I had conflated [[Laura Lippman]] and [[Elinor Lipman]] into the same person, which would confuse me whenever I saw Laura Lippman referenced as a writer of mysteries or suspense novels since the books by Elinor Lippman that I have read could not at all be described that way. I like them both, but they are quite different writers. The more you know ...
    • 3/5
      What the Dead Know is a bit of a convoluted story told in drips and drags that seems more designed to drag out the readers and create drama then being told in a realistic way of how this type of story would actually unfold. A woman in Maryland is involved in a car accident and tells the police that she is one half of a sister duo that went missing thirty years ago. This starts a police investigation into the incident, which has long since been declared a cold case.Although the story had a fair level of entertainment value, my biggest issues with the story is how it was told—in a manner that would drag this out to novel length even though the amount of material is pretty thin and the story could have easily been told in half the length without missing a beat—and believability. Without going into spoilers, the story’s protagonist behaved in a manner that just didn’t make sense. The result is a novel that felt very convoluted and not something that resembles reality. From the woman’s claim of identity to how her life unfolded, I just wasn’t buying into any of it. The end result was an okay novel that still felt a bit dissatisfying. It could have been written and presented better.Carl Alves - author of Conjesero
    • 4/5
      I would probably give this a 3.75 if that were an option but since it's not, I'd rather rate it up than down. I thought the ending ran on a bit long but the rest of the book kept me guessing and interested. I'll definitely look for more Laura Lippman.
    • 3/5
      Excellent Character development, I felt like I actually knew the characters. The story was woven together well, and the level of intrigue was good. Loved the clues that were dropped throughout the book, and after reading the conclusion I went back to reread several section to see how the clues fed into the ending.
    • 3/5
      A 30 year missing persons report is finally solved when a woman claims to be the younger of the two missing sisters.
    • 4/5
      What the Dead Know is the first Laura Lippman story I've read or, in this case, listened to. The narrator, Linda Emond, is wonderful, so I would recommend the audible version.Most of the characters in the novel are well written and have enough quirks and flaws to be interesting. I specifically liked the main detective (Kevin Infante), the father (Dave Bethany), and the social worker (Kay Sullivan).Here's an example of the type of detail she uses to bring her characters to life:The hour on the time for a haircut clock crawled toward four PM. Almost six hours into his day and not a single customer had come into the shop. Was it possible that this site was cursed? A few weeks back Dave had chatted up one of the counter women at Balhas bakery as she dropped cookies into a waxed paper bag. The bakery still used the old fashioned counter balances, the ones that were being phased out by electronic sales that could measure weight to one hundredth of a pound. Dave preferred the inexact elegance of the old scales, enjoyed watching them slowly align as each cookie dropped.Lippman's description is wonderful because the setting matches the mood of the story and at the same time tells us a great deal about Dave.The plot is based on the investigation of a woman involved in a car accident who claims to be one of two sisters kidnapped years earlier. It's possible this woman is lying, but the reasons why she would either make up such an elaborate story or remain missing for so long are what makes the book a good read. I won't say any more than that.Steve Lindahl – author of Motherless Soul and White Horse Regressions
    • 3/5
      A fun book to listen to.
    • 5/5
      I don't know how I missed this book when it came out a few years ago. I wish I had read this book before I read Gillian Flynn's "Gone Girl," because I enjoyed this one much more than "Gone Girl." "What the Dead Know" by Laura Lippman is the story of two sisters who go missing in the mid 1970's. In the early 2000's, a woman is found after a car accident mumbling the name of one of the sisters. The mystery of who this woman is, and what is her connection to the missing sisters. I loved how the author used the format of an unreliable narrator (the woman - is she lying?). This made the whole book questionable for me, in a good way! Rarely do I sit and read a book very quickly, and I did with this one. It was a page turner that I was hooked on. My only complaint is that several of the secondary characters didn't develop much. I would have loved more of Infante's back story and more about that character in general.
    • 3/5
      3.5 starsSisters Heather and Sunny Bethany disappeared together in the mid-70s. Thirty years later, when a women in the same area is in a car accident, but flees the scene, she claims to be one of the Bethany sisters. But, she won't give any details. It was good. I liked the story, but I found the organization a bit tricky to follow at times. I guess I figured it out, but I didn't like that it was done that way. Time and point of view were constantly shifting with each chapter, so it would often take a bit to figure out who we were following and when. I liked that there was an author's note at the end – it was interesting. Usually I see those only with historical fiction, but Lippman had some interesting things to say about the writing of this book.
    • 2/5
      I remember reading it a while ago but the ending has completely left me so it musnt have been very memorable. Maybe I am just getting sick of stories about self obsessed american woman who seem to be screaming ME ME ME all the time.
    • 4/5
      I love Laura Lippman--and always enjoy reading her mysteries set in the Baltimore area. Wish I hadn't guessed the ending, though.
    • 3/5
      People have been raving about Laura Lippmann's stand-alones, but I actually prefer her series. However, this one certainly held my interest and was well-plotted, even though I guessed the ending well in advance.
    • 3/5
      In 1975 two teenage sisters, Sunny and Heather Bethany, disappeared from a Baltimore shopping mall one Saturday afternoon. Despite a lengthy police investigation no trace of the girls was ever found. Their parents, Miriam and Dave, cope as best they can but the event changes the course of both their lives. Fast forward to the present day and, in the aftermath of a car accident, a woman claims that she is the missing Heather Bethany. Due to some inconsistencies in her story and their inability to confirm any of the facts that she gives them, police aren’t convinced she is who she claims to be.

      Reading this book was a frustrating experience. As happened when I saw the movie The Sixth SenseI worked out very early on the twist that would come at the end spent the rest of the time wondering why the heck no one else could see it. Most of the time having worked out the end doesn’t impact my enjoyment of a book as there are many other things to occupy my mind: other plot threads, character development and so on. Here though it hindered my reading as I found it quite unbelievable that no one involved in the story ever voiced the possibility that was so blindingly obvious to me. Plots like this rely on keeping the reader guessing and I wasn’t (guessing that is). Every new revelation just cemented what I had already worked out and so I was bored by the chapters focusing on the present day investigation into the woman claiming to be Heather.

      On other levels the book worked. I enjoyed the structure of it for example. The criss-crossing between a range of time frames was well done and although it didn’t follow any recognisable pattern it wasn’t confusing. We learned a lot about Heather and Sunny’s childhoods, the lives of their parents following the girls’ disappearance and a little about the woman who may, or may not, be the adult Heather. We also saw glimpses of the people who investigated the case, both at the time of the disappearance and in the present day, although this was by no means a police procedural.

      Some of the characters were stunningly developed: in particular Miriam and Dave the parents of the two girls and, for me, the revelation of the various facets of their personalities and lives both before and after the disappearance of their children was the highlight of the book. Lippman portrays two very different ways that people involved in the same horror might deal with it and both are equally credible. When Miriam wonders which event in her life prior to the day of the disappearance she might go back to and change for the entire thing to have been avoided I could feel the genuine agony that thought would cause as it played a never-ending loop in a parent’s mind. The rest of the characters though weren’t nearly as interesting.

      Even putting aside the fact I wasn’t terribly engaged by the plot I’m not entirely sure why this book has generated so much awards fuss. For me it was pretty much a middle of the pack read with occasional sparks of real interest
    • 5/5
      A woman has been involved in an accident and tries to leave the scene. When confronted by the police, she claims to be one of the two Bethany girls who had been kidnapped thirty years ago. Once she makes this claim, she suddenly clams up, forcing a new investigation into the long buried mystery of what actually happened to the girls.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this book. It might not be may favorite book of all time but I adore her writing. I am reading another one of her books at the moment and I am enjoying it more than I did this one. There is something about her writing that keeps me going. Her characters are not the most likable people, but her writing it what sucks you in. I am glad she was recommended on here or I never would have found her. I LOVE this site.
    • 4/5
      A woman involved in a car accident claims to be Heather Bethany, one of the two teenaged sisters who went missing 32 years earlier. She has credible information, including details not released publicly, but something is amiss, especially because she is reticent to reveal much about her present life. A police officer, Kevin Infante, remains skeptical and sets out, with the assistance of others, to find out the truth. The fact that many of the people who could corroborate “Heather’s” story are dead complicates the investigation.What I enjoyed about the book is that the reader is kept guessing about “Heather’s” identity. The clues are there, but there are also plenty of red herrings. What is also great is that when the revelation comes, everything makes perfect sense. Readers who don’t realize the truth before the reveal will be slapping themselves. The story moves back and forth in time. The details of the investigation are given in the present, but there are flashbacks to the disappearance and to what happened to Dave and Miriam, the grieving parents, afterwards. We get to know most of the characters in detail, including their secrets.For those who enjoy mysteries, I would certainly recommend this book and this author.
    • 4/5
      Compelling, good paced mystery with well-drawn and fun characters, lots of red herrings and wit. Very good read!
    • 3/5
      Two sisters are kidnapped from a mall, and 30 years later one of them returns to her hometown--or is she a faker? And to what end? The book is compelling until the very end. The solution is something of a cheat and raises more questions than it answers.