The Most Dangerous Thing (audiobook) by Laura Lippman

A different kind of book

Read by Linda Emond
Duration: 10 hours, 45 minutes
Published by Harper Audio.

Laura Lippman's The Most Dangerous Thing is a superbly deep character study that looks into the lives of 5 suburban children in the 1970s and follows them into the present. These kids are the best of friends for a couple of summers. They consist of three brothers, a beautiful tomboy and a chubby girl who blossoms. They come from three different families, go to three different schools but all live in the suburban neighborhood of Dickeyville, near Baltimore. They spend hours exploring the woods near their neighborhood and what they find there becomes part of a secret that eventually drives the least stable member of their quintet to commit suicide as an adult decades later.

Laura Lippman

As the friends gather for the funeral the secret is slowly drawn out for the reader through a series of flashbacks (through the eyes of all five of the friends and their parents) and current time discussions. The characters are developed in extraordinary detail, which can be frustrating because the book seems to go nowhere, but eventually it does pay off - family secrets are exposed and the true faces of some characters finally come to light. Along the way, Lippman delivers some interesting observations about family life, relationships between men and women and careers. Well worth your time.

Narrator Linda Emond did a great job with a variety of different accents, ages and characters, including the same characters decades apart.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: The Most Dangerous Thing by Laura Lippman.

Reviewed on October 20, 2011.