There’s something about a noir novel with the word ‘sun’ in its title. It’s coming to me now. Wait. It’s almost there.
…
Nope, it’s gone now.
Anyway.
It’s 1994. Two attractive strangers walk into a sleepy Delaware town. She is Polly, a redhead with a sunburn, who has just left her husband and three year old daughter; he is Adam, a PI, looking for a woman once known as Pauline. They meet in the town’s only bar. She finds work as a waitress, he as a cook. They fall in love. There’s an apartment with an iron bed and stained glass windows. The main character buys a lot of vintage dresses from second-hand stores. Everyone constantly listens to TLC’s Waterfalls on the radio. There are many, many secrets.
Sunburn is not Laura Lippman’s first book, but it is her first venture into noir. On paper, that should work; Lippman is a gifted writer, one of those rare thriller writers whose characters aren’t all hypercompetent women and heroic men and where the gore doesn’t drip off every other page. Her novels are wistful, full of characters who make mistakes and have both qualities and flaws. Loose ends aren’t always tied up; sometimes coincidences matter, sometimes they don’t.
All of this should point in favour of Sunburn. I know the critics loved it (pro-tip; if you’re planning on reading this, skip the WaPo review as it gives away about 90% of the plot). I’ve read and loved most of what Ms. Lippman has written, so I was looking forward to this one, but to be perfectly honest, it was a bit of a slog. For 90% of the book so little happens that I was praying for something, anything to happen. Instead, Adam and Polly go to work, have sex, go to work, have sex, and maybe one of them goes on an excursion somewhere that’s probably meant to be mysterious and tantalising but that, more often than not, ended up with me screaming WILL YOU JUST GET ON WITH IT at the pages. My cat was very confused.
What irked me most, though, was the book’s ending. This is the literary equivalent of making a Rube Goldberg machine by upending your bin and throwing a marble at it. It’s cheap, it’s disappointing, it’s frustrating, it’s highly unlikely. Then there’s the fact that almost everyone in the book is a horrible person, with the exception of Adam, who is as bland as a tub of margarine. Polly, meanwhile, reads like a well-intentioned but inherently sexist male author was told he needed stronger female characters and this is what he came up with. This bothers me, because Lippman can and does often write fantastic characters that seem wholly believable.
This might just be me; Sunburn got rave reviews and noir is not my genre anyway, but I felt let down by this one. There’s a bitter edge to the story that leaves a nasty aftertaste, but it’s the convoluted ending that really ticked me off. I’ll read Lippman’s next book, no doubt, and I’m sure I’ll like it, but this one I’d much rather forget about.