(audio) Story of reappearance of one of two sisters who disappeared at 11 & 13. Is this really one of those sisters.

(2007) (audio)Very good stand alone mystery about a woman who is brought to the police's attention after a hit and run incident. She relates a story that she is the surviving younger sister of a pair that disappeared 30 years ago. Everybody finds it hard to believe yet no contradictory evidence can be proven. Slight twist at the end reveals that she is indeed one of the sisters, just not the one she claimed to be.After fleeing a car accident, a middle-aged woman with no ID is questioned by both the police and hospital administration. Refusing to reveal her identity (and proof of health insurance), she instead hints that she is the younger of two sisters, Heather and Sunny Bethany, who disappeared the day before Easter in 1975. This gets everyone's attention. She knows both too much and not enough about the case, leading Baltimore police on wild goose chases to Pennsylvania and Georgia, saying just enough to stay out of jail and keep them interested, albeit suspicious. The narrative threads unravel into the various accounts of that Saturday's events, the aftermath of the disappearance, the investigation, and Heather's own increasingly desperate attempts to evade further disclosure. This novel is a page-turner. Tantalizing revelations are dropped at chapter ends before veering into another part of the narrative, back and forth in time. Characters are well defined and varied, each with a different perspective on the nature of grief. Ultimately, after all of the half-truths and deceptions are played out, unexpected but moving forgiveness wins out. Publishers Weekly - (audio edition)Emond sounds more than a little like Laura Linney, and her plainspoken, occasionally whispery reading of Lippman's disturbing novel of buried secrets often brings the acclaimed actress to mind. Lippman's novel shuttles back and forth between the present, where a middle-aged woman is involved in a hit-and-run accident, and a past in which two girls are abducted from a mall and never seen again. Do the two events have anything to do with each other? Emond brings a sense of quiet force to Lippman's story, her voice imprinted with sadness and a sense of life's tragic surprises. Her reading bridges the unbridgeable gaps between past and present in Lippman's story, offering little in the way of surprises but a marked amount of suppressed, nearly palpable emotion.

This started really well, kept me up reading past lights out, but then slowed down a bit in the middle, and then finally let me know what happened in a single chapter that felt like drinking from a firehouse. ( )

A good story, but I just didn't like most of the characters (except Nancy Porter and Miriam). I find it much more difficult to get into a novel where I have zero rooting interests. But the story was very good. I didn't figure out the ending ahead of time at all, although I should have because all the clues were plainly in sight. So far, I prefer the Tess Monaghan series to Lippman's non-series novels. ( )

What The Dead Know is defiantly not your typical missing child story. I do applaud the originality but was disappointed with the ending . A bit too far fetched for me. ( )