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Since Laura Lippman’s debut, she has been recognized as a distinctive voice in mystery fiction and named one of the “essential” crime writers of the last 100 years. Stephen King called her “special, even extraordinary,” and Gillian Flynn wrote, “She is simply a brilliant novelist.” Her books have won most of the major awards in her field and been translated into more than twenty-five languages. She lives in Baltimore and New Orleans with her teenager.

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The three girls have been inseparable best friends since the third grade -- Josie, the athletic one; Perri, the brilliant, acerbic drama queen; and Kat, the beauty, who also has brains, grace, and a heart open to all around her. But their last day of high school becomes their final day together after one of them brings a gun to school to resolve a mysterious feud. When the police arrive, they discover two wounded girls, one so critically that she is not expected to recover. The third girl is dead, killed instantly by a shot to the heart.

What transpired that morning at Glendale High rocks the foundation of an affluent community in Baltimore's distant suburbs, a place that has barelyrecovered from an earlier, more comprehensible tragedy. For the shell-shocked parents, teachers, administrators, and students, healing must begin with answers to the usual questions -- but only if the answers are safe ones, answers that will lead back to one girl and one family and absolve everyone else.

For Homicide Sgt. Harold Lenhardt, this case is a mystery with more twists than these grief-stricken suburbanites are willing to acknowledge -- and the sole lucid survivor, a girl with a teenager's uncanny knack for stonewalling, strikes him as being less than honest. What is she concealing? Is she trying to protect herself or someone else? Even the simplest secrets can kill -- and kill again if no one is willing to confront them.

Breathtaking in its emotional depth, powerful, provocative, and consistently surprising, Laura Lippman's To the Power of Three carries the crime novel into richer, more fertile territory. It is the crowning achievement to date in an already exemplary literary career.

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To the Power of Three

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

People would want to know what she was thinking,the night before. They always do, or think they do -- but in hercase they would have been disappointed. Because by the night before,the thinking was long over and she was preoccupied mainlywith logistics. Planning, preparing, packing. Finding her old knapsack,an orange-and-black JanSport she hadn't used for months,not since Christmastime.

Knapsacks had gone out of fashion that spring at GlendaleHigh School, at least among the stylish girls. The divas, as theywere known -- they had bestowed the name on themselves andconsidered it laudatory -- had taken to carrying plastic totes inbright primary colors, see-through and flimsy. Even the namebrandversions, the ones that cost upwards of a hundred dollars,buckled under the weight the divas expected them to carry. Butthen it's a myth that more expensive things are better made -- orso her father always said, whenever she expressed a desire forsomething trendy. At the mall she had seen diva mothers storminto Nordstrom or Hecht Co., proclaiming the totes defective."What was she using it for?" skeptical salesladies inquired, examiningthe torn and stretched-out handles beneath the fluorescentlights. "The usual," lied the mothers. "Girl stuff."

In the end the salesladies didn't care if the mothers stretchedthe truth as far as those rubbery handles, because they always leftwith even more merchandise -- not only a replacement tote ortwo but those hideous Louis Vuitton billfolds that were so unfathomablypopular that spring, maybe a small cosmetic bag in thesame distinctive-tacky pattern. They needed cosmetic bags becausethe totes had another design flaw. The not-quite-opaqueplastic allowed the world to see whatever one carried. Forget tryingto bring Tampax to school, or even a hairbrush. (She had alwaysconsidered hairbrushes one of the more horrible secrets thatregular purses kept -- oily, matted with hair, shedding thosestrange little scales.) Yet perhaps that was the very source of thetotes' cachet: To use one, you had to pretend you had no secrets,that your life was an open book -- or, more correctly, a seethroughpurse. You couldn't put anything in those totes that youdidn't want other people to glimpse.

Especially a gun, no matter how small. Even a gun wrapped ina scarf, as hers would be.

The problem was that she, too, had abandoned her knapsackearlier that school year, although she was not one to follow thetrends, quite the opposite. She had different reasons for retiringher trusty JanSport. I am putting away childish things, she told herself inNovember, having been reminded of that Bible verse whilerereading a favorite childhood novel. Her mother had gotten acanvas bag at Barnes & Noble, one with Emily Dickinson's face,and she had co-opted it for a joke, just to test how ignorant everyonewas. ("Is that someone you know?" "Is that you?" "A relative?")She hadn't planned to use it every day, but then her parentsbegan to nag, said she was going to throw her spine out of alignmentor damage the nerves in her shoulder. Then she had to keepusing it, if only to prove to them that it was her spine, her nerves,her life.

Except the Emily Dickinson bag was forever falling over, scattering its contents. She couldn't afford such accidents or missteps,not on the day she took her gun to school.

She finally found her knapsack at the back of her closet, and itwas a kind of relief to be reunited with her old, practical friend.She dampened a paper towel and ran it over the bag's insides, removingdebris from last fall -- cookie crumbs, specks of chocolate,a lone Brazil nut, which would have been there since September,when she tried to go vegan and lasted all of a week. She had carriedthis knapsack for four years, from fall of eighth grade to thefall of twelfth grade, and its surface -- the names and former loyaltiesinked onto its orange nylon, the rips and tears -- was a vividreminder of how much she had changed. You probably shouldn't get tattooed,her mother always said. You don't know who you're going to be whenyou're thirty. But a tattoo can be concealed, or even removed withlasers. Piercings close up if you give them enough time. A knapsackcovered with embarrassing sentiments in permanent inkcould only be discarded or replaced. Her parents would have purchasedher a new one if she had only explained her reasons, butthat was one thing she hadn't dared to do. She was tired of explainingherself.

Once the bag was clean inside, she surveyed the things laid outon her bed. There was her notebook, the take-home test for Mrs.Downey, her independent study project for Ms. Cunningham.And there was the gun, wrapped in a silk scarf from the old dressupchest.

The gun had been in her possession for almost a month, butthe mere sight of it still shocked her. It was so like the toy sixshootershe had begged for when she was little, not even four. Whyhad she yearned for a gun, a holster, and a cowboy hat at such anage? She had wanted to be Calamity Jane or Annie Oakley, marchingaround the house singing "Anything You Can Do, I Can DoBetter." Yes, it was queer, but then everyone was queer when little.And maybe she had wanted to shock her parents, who weren't hippies but were antiwar, even this current one, which a lot ofGlendale parents had said was okay when it started.

Excerpted from To the Power of Threeby Laura Lippman Copyright ©2005 by Laura Lippman. Excerpted by permission.
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