Butchers Hill by Laura Lippman

Baltimore Blues
Charm City

Butchers Hill is the third book in Lippman's Tess Monaghan series. Our girl Friday Tess has elevated herself from the part-part-time work she was doing in Baltimore Blues all the way to opening her own private detective agency. She gets two cases to work on in this novel. One job is to track down a client's daughter, a daughter the client had given up for abortion thirteen years ago. The other job is to track down some foster children who the client had harmed in the past and now wants to make restitution to.  As these things go, as soon as Tess gets involved, chaos begins.  Witnesses started to disappear, there are people dying, and family mysteries start to come unraveled.

There's a lot in this book. It delves into privacy issues for adoptees and foster children. It delves into race. There are a couple of scenes in which Tess, who is white, can't get information, so she sends in her client, who is black. Tess, who had just a scene or two previously, been joking about the impact of race on her black client, is forced to face what her own privilege can and can't get her. The book also tackles Baltimore's problems with government corruption, which is not nothing, but does get sidelined a tiny bit here.

I really enjoy the character of Tess. She's absolutely terrible at reading a room. She's kind of terrible at being a detective - it seems like she's mostly just relying on calling in favors from people to do the legwork and I'm a bit concerned about how she's going to make it work when those favors are gone.  She loves her dog, but doesn't really seem to understand her own feelings. I also love the supporting characters - her lawyer mentor, her uncle, her mom, and her aunt are all developing into people I want to hang out with.

But the story was a bit confusing, to be honest. I'm not entirely sure I understood the ending. It just seemed so rushed and didn't explain to the reader what was going on. There was a scene in which it was clear that Tess knew what was going on, but instead of taking the readers through the flash of insight that Tess had, we just followed along with her rushing around, and that insight never was explained. Also, a major event happened off page and I'm still not clear how any of that shook out (slight spoiler: there was an unexpected guest at the picnic - how did the guest know where the picnic was?).  The ending really brought this book down in my estimation.

However, I do love the world of Tess Monaghan. I'm going to keep going with this series. Maybe they'll be more explanation of this novel in a future novel!