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.

Reporter-turned-p.i. Tess Monaghan loves every inch of her native Baltimore—a quirky city where baseball reigns, and homicide seems to be the second most popular sport. Business tycoon “Wink” Wynkowski wants to change all of that by bringing pro-basketball back to town—a laudable mission that’s greeted with widespread cheers . . . and a muckraking front page exposé of his past in the Baltimore Beacon-Light. The “Blight’s” surprised editors are sure they killed the piece. Instead, the piece kills Wynkowski, who’s discovered asphyxiated in his garage with his car’s engine running. Now the paper wants former newshound Tess to track down the rogue computer hacker whose prank took a human life. But there’s more than cyber-crime involved here—and Tess is about to discover firsthand that trying to stay alive in Charm City is murder these days.