Sunburn

An insurance scam (or two or three), lovers working at an out-of-the-way diner: the elements of James M. Cain's greatest crime novels are in plain sight, and Lippman clearly had some fun putting them there. But Sunburn doesn't read like a mere noir pastiche: for one thing, like all of her books it's fully grounded in her home territory of Baltimore, or in this case a small town in the nearby nowheresville of non-shore Delaware. And for another, her heroine Pauline, who carries much of Mildred Pierce's flinty-but-vulnerable ambition, is as vivid and memorable as you could hope to encounter.

(Download the audio book at Libro.fm.)