After her brilliant stand-alone thriller EVERY SECRET THING, Lippman returns to her series character, PI Tess Monaghan, and her home town of Baltimore.
Natalie Rubin, middle-class Jewish wife and mother, has vanished. Worse, she has taken her three children with her. Her husband, Mark, is devastated. He loves her; and he thought she was happy. So he approaches Tess to trace her.
At first Tess is wary. She doesn't like getting involved in domestic disputes, and Mark's love for his wife seems to contain a disturbing desire to control her. Did he drive her away? Did he perhaps kill her? But as Tess pursues her quest for Natalie, she discovers a woman with a mysterious past, a man whose values will challenge her own, and a family that knows how to keep its secrets... By a Spider's Thread is part tense thriller and part all-too-human drama about what families do to each other.
Lippman exaines in depth the concept of marriage and the reasons why families fall apart. - GOOD BOOK GUIDE, December 2005
Before becoming a full-time novelist, Laura Lippman was a newspaper reporter for many years. She has won just about every crime writing award going, including the Anthony Award and non genre awards for Literary Excellence. She lives in Baltimore with her partner, the writer David Simon, and their daughter.