Laura Lippman calls her work "tart noir" and Sunburn is her most obvious homage to traditional noir. We meet Polly and Adam in a bar when he offers to buy her a drink. She remains cool, and yet we know that they will begin an affair. She's escaping a marriage before her husband can divorce her, and ends up as a waitress in a small town in Delaware. Adam manages to get himself hired as a chef and as you expect, there's more to his story than a simple obsession with a woman he "happened" to meet. Lippman accurately captures the just-before-now mid-90s setting, but the characters are a bit too cool to grab my interest. It's a book where I enjoyed the slowly revealed plot but cared less because the characters were so opaque.
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