by Laura Lippman.

William Morrow. 325 pages. $24.95.

BY MANDY TWADDELL
Special to the Journal

This is Laura Lippman’s 10th novel in a series featuring Tess Monaghan, an ex-newspaper reporter turned private investigator in Baltimore.

Like her sleuth and alter ego, Lippman is a former journalist, and her prose reflects that straightforward narrative style. And she is married to a television producer, which doubtless contributed to the apparent authenticity of the book’s show-biz environment. Yet the plot — Mann of Steele, a TV series in production, falls prey to mysterious bad acts and PI Tess must root out the trouble by interviewing actors trained to take on identities other than their own — the crimes, the characters did not engage me.

Here and there the acerbic asides of the displaced principals kept me reading, however:

Hollywood Ben, filming in Baltimore, inwardly observes: “Even the people in Starbucks all looked weird. Pale, pasty. All right, downright doughy. Not to mention the teeth — God, the teeth. Living in California, where almost everyone had veneers and whiteners, one forgot what real teeth looked like. . . . Worst of all, Baltimoreans also had this — how to describe it — bovine happiness. No one seemed rushed or impatient here, a fact that drove Ben mildly insane when he was trying to order his morning mocha and get to work. The people around him were too dumb to know how miserable they should be.”

Flip, the producer, tells Tess, “I bet half the people here think they have a television show or a movie inside them. Of course, they don’t want to do the grubby work of actually writing it. They just want to tell someone their idea and share the money, fifty-fifty . . . because their idea, as they’ll be the first to tell you, is a million-dollar idea. But here’s the thing civilians don’t get . . . ideas are worthless. . . . It’s the application of ideas that has value. . . . The idea is the easiest thing to have.” You get why he’s called “Flip.”

Last year, Lippman produced a stand-alone novel that made the bestseller list. It was entitled What The Dead Know, a story of two young sisters who vanished from a shopping mall. Decades later, a woman appears claiming to be one of them. That book, based on a real-life story, grabbed my attention. This one did not. ANOTHER THING TO FALL,

jimandy111@cox.net