When she’s on her best form, she knocks the big beasts of US crime fiction into a cocked hat.
And she’s very much at her best in Sunburn, her 22nd novel and a cheeky homage to James M Cain’s overheated noir masterpieces like The Postman Always Rings Twice.
The book begins with “heroine” Polly sensing that her husband Gregg is about to walk out on her and leave her to raise their toddler daughter on her own.
So she turns the tables, withdrawing half the money from their joint account and abandoning him without warning to life as a single dad.
It’s the sort of deliciously provocative move that’s typical of Laura Lippman: trying to make a sympathetic protagonist out of a woman who has unrepentantly committed the ultimate sin against motherhood.
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But some parents might find a touch of envy mixed in with their disapproval.
Polly changes her name and gets a job as a waitress in Belleville, a boondocks town in Delaware, before beginning a passionate affair with Adam, another new arrival in the town.
She’s keeping a lot of the details of her past a secret but Adam, it transpires, is doing the same.
Then a suspicious death sends their relationship in a new direction.
Approach Sunburn in the same way you would a sheaf of election manifestos: start from the position that everybody is lying about something then try and work out what.
The author resolves it all brilliantly.
This is one of her lighter works but her pleasure in her own ingenuity is infectious.