Lippman’s prose doesn’t, thankfully, attempt to imitate Cain’s famously hard-boiled patter, but their stories share more literary DNA than you might think. This is funny, but it is also more than just a good, inside-baseball joke. Cain classics such as “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” studying the master’s relentless tales of sex and murder as if they were how-to manuals. Meanwhile, Polly turns up in all black, wearing “retro heels” and looking “like Joan Crawford or Bette Davis … tough, yet brittle.” And she goes to the library to scope out James M. (Rather than living on the traditional gumshoe fare of whiskey and cigarettes, for example, Adam Bosk turns out to be a skillful chef.)

What makes the novel such good fun for fans of the genre is the self-aware way Lippman plays with these conventions. There’s the mysterious outsider whose arrival throws a local ecosystem badly out of whack, the menacing villain from a buried past, and the closely held secret that explains all. Lippman deploys, with obvious relish and consummate skill, an assortment of classic pulp crime-novel tropes. Taken together, of course.” And that’s when the trouble starts. Polly and Adam circle each other warily before coming together for the clinch, which takes the form of “one of those sex hazes where one stops for a little food, a little sleep, a shower. Bosk is meant to be secretly running herd on Polly, but she turns the tables on him with comical speed, and the ensuing dance of sexual attraction, mistrust and deception is skillfully choreographed and crackling with erotic possibility. In true siren fashion, she quickly finds a patsy in private investigator Adam Bosk, who, in time-honored patsy tradition, is strong, handsome and dimwitted.

Sunburn by laura lippman