Sunburn refers to the sunburn PI Adam Bosk sees on Pauline "Polly" Costello the woman he has been hired to observe and find out where she is hiding the money she ripped off of her stepdaughter according to his client Irving Lowenstein. Pauline has just left husband number two with her three-year-old daughter and headed down the road and stopped in the small town of Belleville, Delaware and decided to hole up here for a while. She gets a job as a waitress at the High-Ho bar and restaurant.
When he flirts with her she doesn't respond at first and then when one night she does, he is so shocked and not sure about going back to her room that he just leaves the bar which is the wrong move. To give him a reason to stay in the town he uses his cooking skills to work as a cook there and tries flirting with her but gets shut down. So he decides to start a sexual relationship with the other waitress Cath to inspire jealousy and it works.
She tells him to just stop talking to Cath. That that would be the easiest way to break things off with her and keep their relationship a secret. It's not long that Adam is falling for Polly and against her better judgment she is falling for him. We learn that Polly killed her first husband by stabbing him in the heart in his sleep because he was abusive and threatened to kill her and their disabled daughter. She was pardoned by the governor who decided to pardon some women who had been ill-used by the world and the law. She had taken out a life insurance policy on her husband with Irving's help but put the policy in the name of her daughter. Irving had expected to get a commission on that policy and was pissed when he didn't get it. Polly turned the care of her daughter over to the state. So she's left two children behind.
Her second husband hires a PI to find her and then comes down threatening her if she doesn't come back but Adam intervenes and he leaves and goes back home with his tail between his legs. Polly is hiding something from everyone and has a secret plan. Polly is a bit of a bitch, but you kinda can't help but like her anyway. Some of that's due to the fact that she was abused by her first husband. You feel sorry for her for that. But some of it is just her moxie to do what she wants to get what she wants no matter who's in the way. And both of their treatment toward Cath is deplorable. You do feel sorry for Adam who seems like a sweet guy for what he is getting himself into. This book is set in 1995 before the internet really came about so it's not like he could run a search and find out all this information on her and she had changed her name. He was dependent on the information Irving had given him and believed that Irving had run a LexisNexis report on her. This book holds many surprises and twists and turns you don't expect. Lippman is a master storyteller who weaves an intricate web that you won't see the design of until you get to the last page. This was a fantastic book and I highly recommend it.
Link to Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Sunburn-Novel-Laura-Lippman-ebook/dp/B0727T88KQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1532260700&sr=8-1&keywords=sunburn+by+laura+lipman
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