Prom Mom: A Thriller

Product Information

The Guardian spoke with Lippman a week before Prom Mom’s publication. The interview has been edited and condensed.

Gripping... Lippman works up a slow burn, gently teasing out a game of cat and mouse between Joe and Amber that comes into full focus toward the end of the novel. Readers who persevere will reach a devilishly satisfying conclusion." -- Publishers Weekly Pitch a book to me as a “feminist update of Rosemary’s Baby”, as Danielle Valentine’s Delicate Condition (Profile) is described, and I am very interested. Anna Alcott is a famous actor who is desperate to have a baby with her husband, Dex. She is in the middle of a gruelling IVF regime, but her medicines keep getting lost and her medical appointments move around. Once she does fall pregnant, she asks herself whether this confusion is just “pregnancy brain”. Then the ultrasound of Anna’s child is stolen and the doctors tell her she has lost her baby. Written while the author was pregnant with her first child, Delicate Condition is an indictment of how women are treated during pregnancy, dismissed and ignored, their pain overlooked. Outside of a few, I really don’t think most books are as specific as Lippman’s. I think we all know more about LA and NYC practically by osmosis than we would about most cities because so many books and movies take place there but most other cities can’t say that. I think about this a lot and try to pay attention to it and I rarely get the impression that the authors are being as specific as she is. Dubbed ‘The Prom Mom’ for giving birth in a bathroom during a high school dance, the scandalous title dominated media headlines some twenty years prior.The pains were labor pains. Amber delivered the baby and then ended up killing it....something she didn't remember.

I liked that the book references the political landscape, it adds context and colour. Joe and Meredith are well-drawn, realistic characters; Amber I found a little more unknowable - there’s a hint that she’s neurodivergent perhaps, though this isn’t explored. Baltimore actually has two authors that spend a lot of time here and who place their characters and plot in very specific and real places. One of Anne Tyler’s most recent books takes place right up the street from Prom Mom which takes place largely in a community just outside the city in the surrounding Baltimore County.

Need Help?

A woman is walking along a dark road late at night in a short skirt, phone out of battery, when a car slows to ask her if she needs help. She is looking for someone dangerous, the monster who took her sister. Is this the night her search comes to an end? Throw in the brilliant detective Denise and occasional chilling insights from the killer himself, and you’ve got a corker of a read There were several big reveals at the end, only one of which I didn’t see coming. The ending was actually a pretty big disappointment. It’s always fun for me to read Lippman’s books, representing a return to my hometown. And she always makes a point of really laying out the territory, giving a true feel for the area. We don’t know much about Amber Glass and the infamy causing her to escape her hometown the second she turned eighteen. In Bruce Borgos’ series-launching rural Nevada thriller ‘The Bitter Past,’ a small-town sheriff stumbles on a plot straight out of ‘The Americans.’

Despite what its title might suggest, there is little of the lurid or cheap in Lippman’s latest, Prom Mom. Lippman drew inspiration from the real-life episode that made headlines in 1997 when the New Jersey teen Melissa Wexler gave birth to a 28-week-old baby who was found dead in the bathroom during her high school prom. I’m fascinated by people who, in the middle of a pandemic, would be like, ‘Yeah, I can have an affair,’” Lippman continues, adding how the human condition will rationalize just about anything when it comes to obtaining what we think we deserve, which is what we come to find out about Nice Guy™ Joe, one of three protagonists in Prom Mom, who “can justify pretty much anything he does.” It’s January 2020, and Amber Glass has just returned to Baltimore to settle her stepfather’s estate. She has no intentions of reconnecting with Joe, who is now married to a beautiful and successful plastic surgeon named Meredith, but she can’t seem to stay away – and Joe can’t stay away from her, either.

Prom Mom is all ominous mood and elegant nuance; you don't know where Lippman is going, but you'll happily follow." -- The Seattle Times

Amber Glass has spent her entire adult life trying to escape her past. In her hometown of Baltimore, MD, Amber was known as the "Prom Mom" who allegedly killed her baby the night of the prom (1997). Prom Mom has a strong sense of place, transporting the reader to Baltimore with all its sights and sounds, and Lippman really captures the surreal, downright weirdness of Covid times. Her writing is so sharp, and she crafts the best characters – the morally gray, psychologically intense ones that you don’t like, but are completely fascinated by. She writes in the noir style, in prose that is straightforward and unemotional, but there is still so much depth to her stories and her characters. PROM MOM is a slow build up with mostly unlikable characters, especially Joe, and a plot that makes you wonder where this story line is going. Prom Mom, the latest novel from prolific US writer Laura Lippman, was inspired by a podcast episode of “You’re Wrong About” called Prom Mom.If I were the kind of writer who was extremely calculating, I wouldn’t have written this book. No one wants to read about Covid; dead-baby stories are not good,” she says. The reason Lippman hasn’t returned to Tess Monaghan since 2015 is twofold: Firstly, Lippman’s imagination “got a lot darker,” creating the likes of Amber, Joe, and Meredith, who “don’t fit the series.” Secondly, reflecting on what happened in Lippman’s own life when she became a mother at 51, the writer thought it would be “funny” to give Tess a baby herself, which immediately lowered the stakes as to what risks a detective could feasibly take. “I feel she has a responsibility as a mother and a spouse to be very careful, which is anathema to a suspense novel,” Lippman says. Tess Monaghan fans, never fear, though: Lippman foresees a trilogy to wrap up the PI’s story. “I just don’t know what they are yet.”