Prom Mom by Laura Lippman: powerful, probing tale of festering secrets, dangerous obsession and deadly desires – book review -

So, twenty years after a school prom night scandal which rocked the city of Baltimore and saw Amber jailed, why would she choose to go back to the place where her childhood dreams were destroyed?

Award-winning US author Laura Lippman – recognised as one of today’s most talented crime novelists – explores the dark recesses of the human mind in this powerful, probing tale of festering secrets, dangerous obsession and deadly desires, set against the unsettling backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic.

At the heart of this slow-burn crime mystery – inspired by a real-life story – is the compelling and complex relationship between Amber and serial love cheat Joe, a liaison marked out by the decades-old killing of their newborn baby... and a pulsating, psychological game of cat-and-mouse in the present.

Amber Glass has spent her entire adult life putting as much distance as possible between her and her home town of Baltimore where she fears she will forever be known as ‘Prom Mom.’ She was the teenage girl who allegedly killed her baby, born on her bathroom floor that night of the prom, after her date, Joe Simpson, abandoned her for the evening to pursue another girl.

No one had even known she was pregnant, including Joe, and after serving time in a juvenile prison for involuntary manslaughter, she left town for good and hasn’t seen Joe since. But she knows he hasn’t left Baltimore, that he’s working for his father’s real estate company, is married to cosmetic surgeon Meredith Duval, and is child free.

Meanwhile, Amber has worked hard, got herself a degree and made a career out of curating and displaying the work of untrained artists. She is currently living in New Orleans but when the death of her stepfather brings Amber back to Baltimore, she realises she can have a second chance to be ‘me and nothing more than me’ again.

Opening an art gallery is her first successful step but Amber knows she must stay away from Joe who is finding success in his job as a commercial real estate developer and, by all accounts, is devoted to his wife Meredith who survived a childhood cancer.

The problem is, Amber can’t stay away from Joe and when they finally meet, Joe – who, it turns out, is having an affair with a girl called Jordan from his office – finds that it’s increasingly hard for him to ignore Amber, if only because she remembers the boy he was and the man he said he was going to be.

As Covid-19 and lockdown grips the nation, Amber and Joe are slowly and secretly drawn to each other and eventually cross the line they have been trying to avoid. And then Joe asks Amber to help him do the unthinkable... and she must decide if she is willing to let their toxic and dangerous past repeat itself.

The menace level scales the heights in this gripping guessing game of a novel which stars two flawed and fallible characters, each scarred by the past but both with designs on the future, and the two women who come into their orbit.

All the action dates back to that fateful prom night when Amber’s premature baby died on a bathroom floor while Joe danced with another girl. But Lippman teases out the truth of those fateful events and that life-changing night through the prism of their meeting again twenty years later.

And behind them all hovers the fifth character in this intriguing thriller... the surreal landscape of the pandemic, an extraordinary time when the world shut down and people moved in the shadows, creating the perfect hiding place for dark secrets and dangerous deeds.

Harnessing these alluring atmospherics with her trademark mastery, Lippman allows her story to unfold in a flurry of revealing moments and flashbacks... but nothing and nobody is what it seems in Prom Mom so expect one final, fierce incandescent flame to explode across the page in her unforgettable last act.

(Faber & Faber, paperback, £8.99)