Felix Brewer left a wife, three daughters, and a mistress behind when he fled for parts unknown in 1976. While there is a murder mystery, After I'm Gone is more about what happens to the people left behind. I've read a couple of Laura Lippman's Tess Monaghan mysteries and decided to give this standalone a shot when it showed up in my BookGorilla email one day. Can he find what happened to Felix Brewer and who killed his mistress? Now Roberto 'Sandy' Sanchez, a consulting detective, is on the cold case.

until her body was discovered years later. When his mistress went missing ten years later, everyone assumed she'd gone to live with him in hiding. When small time gangster Felix Brewer fled Baltimore in 1976 to escape jail time, he left his family and his mistress in the lurch. Does at least one of them know the truth? And at its center is the man who, though long gone, has never been forgotten by the five women who loved him: the enigmatic Felix Brewer.įelix Brewer left five women behind. What he discovers is a tangled web of bitterness, jealousy, resentment, greed, and longing stretching over five decades. Now, twenty-six years later, Roberto 'Sandy' Sanchez, a retired Baltimore detective working cold cases for some extra cash, is investigating her murder.

When Julie disappears ten years to the day after Felix went on the lam, everyone assumes she's left to join her old lover-until her remains are discovered in a secluded park. Though Bambi has no idea where her husband-or his money-might be, she suspects one woman does: his devoted young mistress, Julie.

But on the Fourth of July in 1976, Bambi's comfortable world implodes when Felix, facing prison, vanishes. Thanks to his lucrative-if not all legal-businesses, she and their three little girls live in luxury. When Felix Brewer meets nineteen-year-old Bernadette 'Bambi' Gottschalk at a Valentine's Day dance in 1959, he charms her with wild promises, some of which he actually keeps. The acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of The Most Dangerous Thing, I'd Know You Anywhere, and What the Dead Know returns with an addictive story that explores how one man's disappearance echoes through the lives of the five women he left behind-his wife, his daughters, and his mistress

After I'm Gone by Laura Lippman