Murder Takes a Vacation

Lippman, a former journalist for the Baltimore Sun, drew on her long experience as a crime beat reporter when she branched into novel-writing in 1997. Her first novel, Baltimore Blues, introduced her longtime character Tess Monaghan, a private investigator who, like Lippman, works as a Baltimore crime reporter. Lippman has acknowledged Monaghan’s autobiographical roots, noting also that her first mystery novel was inspired by her “fleeting desire to kill someone” (“The Books.” LauraLippman.com). Over the next few decades, Lippman followed Baltimore Blues with a dozen more Tess Monaghan novels and novellas, most of them set in Baltimore, as well as a few standalone mysteries based on real-life events. What the Dead Know (2007), for instance, drew on the widely publicized disappearance of two preteen sisters from a Maryland shopping center in 1975, and Lady in the Lake (2019) on the 1969 murder of an 11-year-old girl in Baltimore.

Muriel Blossom, the elderly protagonist and amateur sleuth of Murder Takes a Vacation, played a supporting role in some of Lippman’s Tess Monaghan mysteries, notably Another Thing to Fall (2008), which featured her as Monaghan’s student and sometime assistant.