In Conversation: On Dream Girl: A Novel & The Dark Hours

New York Times bestselling author Laura Lippman is hailed as a distinctive voice in mystery fiction. Best known for writing a series of novels set in Baltimore and featuring reporter-turned-private investigator Tess Monaghan, Lippman’s books have won most of the significant honors in her field, including the Agatha, Anthony, and Edgar Allan Poe Award. In Dream Girl: A Novel (William Morrow), writer Gerry Andersen, injured in a freak fall, is confined to a hospital bed in his high-rise apartment and dependent on two women he barely knows: his incurious young assistant and a dull, slow-witted night nurse. Then late one night the phone rings – and the caller claims to be the “real” Aubrey, the title character from Andersen’s most successful novel, Dream Girl. But there is no “real” Aubrey; she’s a figment of his imagination. Isolated from the world, drowsy from medication, Andersen slips between reality and a dreamlike state in which his past haunts him – and now, here is Aubrey, threatening to visit him and suggesting that he owes her something. The Washington Post noted that “Socially conscious (the #MeToo movement makes a decisive entrance into the plot) and packed with humor, ghosts and narrative turn of the screw, Lippman’s Dream Girl is indeed a dream of a novel for suspense lovers and fans of literary satire alike.”

Michael Connelly is the author of 35 previous novels, including The New York Times bestsellers The Law of Innocence, Fair Warning, and The Night Fire. A former newspaper reporter, his books, which include the Harry Bosch, Lincoln Lawyer, and Renée Ballard series, have sold more than 80 million copies worldwide. In The Dark Hours (Little, Brown and Company), the fourth installment in the Ballard and Bosch series, it’s New Year’s Eve in Hollywood and LAPD detective Renée Ballard waits out the traditional rain of lead as hundreds of revelers shoot their guns into the air after the countdown. Minutes after midnight, she’s called to a scene where a hardworking auto shop owner has been fatally hit by a bullet in a crowded street party. Ballard quickly determines that the deadly bullet could not have fallen from the sky, and that it's linked to another unsolved murder. But the department is so hampered by inertia and low morale that to solve both cases, Ballard must go outside to the one detective she can count on: Harry Bosch. And as the two detectives work together to find out where old and new cases intersect, they must constantly look over their shoulders. Jeff Ayers of The Associated Press called Connelly “the Raymond Chandler of this generation, and readers will be studying his writing methods decades from now.”