DREAM GIRL

Lippman's ingenious, allusive, and daring new thriller makes for a massively entertaining audiobook. It nods to REAR WINDOW, MISERY, and a host of other iconic suspense fictions, even including a brief appearance by Lippman's own trademark PI Tess Monaghan, but Lippman spins them all. Narrator Jason Culp creates vivid characters and delivers emotion, color, humor, and momentum with skill and verve. The setup: Famous (if fading) novelist Gerry Anderson, confined to bed by an injury, starts getting threatening calls from a nonexistent person, a character from his long ago breakout novel, DREAM GIRL. (Monaghan declines to take his case.) Lippman pulls off a whiz-bang plot on top of a deliciously accurate portrait of the good, bad, and ugly of being a brand-name 21st-century writer. B.G. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine [Published: MAY 2021]