BOOK

Laura Lippman, What the Dead Know (Morrow, $24.95).The dust jacket bills it as “a novel,” with nary a whisper of crime, and that’s pretty much on the mark. Yes, dirty work is done in Lippman’s latest, but this tale of a pair of missing persons is expansive, unformulaic, and deeply involving. Read it for the plot if you must–you won’t be disappointed–but the real point of What the Dead Know is the imaginative sympathy with which it explores the complicated lives of its characters (TT).