This one is heartbreaking though at first I was confused by all of the players. Lippman does a great job of showing the consequences that Tess has to live with when she refuses to let a case go. Tess's family pays for it and it leaves her slightly estranged from her father. Considering that we never really got a sense that Tess's father was disapproving of what Tess did for a living, it was surprising to see him and Tess fighting in this one. In the end, the ending was very well done and I loved how Tess was about dealing with an eye for an eye (messing with her family does not go unpunished).

"The Sugar House" has Tess being asked to look into a murdered girl by one of Tess's father's friends. The woman who asks, Ruth, believes that her brother was set up to take the fall for a girl the police say he took back to his house and murdered. While in jail he was murdered, and Ruth wants someone to pay. Tess initially thinks this case is going to be one long dead end until she finds out enough clues to trace the unknown dead girl to a house for young teens who are dealing with eating disorders. As readers know, Tess dealt with an eating disorder when she was young, she also finds out her long time friend Whitney dealt with one as well. 

When Tess starts to find links between the dead girl and possibly some people that her father knows, that is when things go from bad to worse.

We have the usual suspects in this one, Aunt Kitty, Jackie, Whitney, Uncle Spike and now we have Crow (he and Tess are trying again and are deliriously happy) and Tess's friends at the paper, along with her cop friend too. 

I do love how Tess is still haunted by the choices she made in book #1 and realizes she doesn't want to just look the other way again. She knows that some people did something terrible to this girl and it stings that her father is telling her to let it go and who cares. 

The writing was really good and I have to laugh at Whitney coming along as Tess's sidekick in this one. 

The flow was great and I maybe read this one too fast. I was so worried that something was going to happen to several characters in this one.

The ending was great and it's nice to see that Tess is earning a good reputation as a private investigator. 

Well we have Tess back in Baltimore and knee deep in corruption. This time some ties are leading back to her very own father. I like how Lippman calls back Tess's eating disorder when she was younger and how it comes into play in this case she is on now. I am curious on how this is going to go though. If Tess continues investigating she may end up hurting her family. Crow and she are back together and seem to be stronger than ever. Very happy Whitney is back from Japan as well. Tess could do a lot worse than having her as a partner. 

I loved reading this book. It’s a memoir of the author’s privileged childhood in Liberia, the early days of civil war there and her family’s flight, and her journey of building a life in another country and ultimately coming to terms with her homeland.

Helene Cooper is an award-winning journalist, and you can see that clearly in her writing, which is compelling, informative, and relatable. She builds scenes from her childhood in an almost novelistic way, and explores the dynamics of her complicated family with depth and honesty. While she was born to a Liberian dynasty (descended from the first free blacks who arrived from the U.S. to build a colony), there’s an ever-present reminder of her privilege in her best friend, a poor native Liberian girl her parents adopt to be her playmate. The divergence between the lives of these two as they grow older tells you a lot about Liberia (and the world). Cooper is also able to tell a personal, gripping story about the war, in which her family does not escape violence. And she includes a few helpful chapters detailing her family history and the early history of Liberia. While the portion of the book dealing with her life outside Liberia is much shorter, it’s still an interesting look at the family members’ relative assimilation and race relations in the U.S.

But it isn’t all heavy stuff. There’s quite a bit of humor and fun in the book, especially as the author remembers her childhood and teenage years. She also seems enthusiastic about explaining Liberian culture and Liberian English to those unfamiliar with it, adding a lot of flavor to the story.

In fact, perhaps neither of my two reservations about the book is fairly attributed to the author. One is that it has more than its share of copyediting mistakes. The other is that, despite the history included, I never understood how the relatively peaceful country in which Cooper grew up spawned one of Africa’s most brutal civil wars, with all the atrocities she describes. I’m sure that to the teenaged Helene Cooper this made just as little sense; but as a veteran foreign correspondent who rode along for the invasion of Iraq, she probably has some insight into what makes wars different from one another. I would have appreciated the level of research about the war that she clearly put into the colony’s early years, though as a memoir the book succeeds regardless.

Overall, this is a very well-told story featuring distinct, complicated personalities, from a self-aware and thoughtful writer with fascinating life experiences. It’s also a great way to learn about a corner of the world that most people know little about. I would definitely recommend this one.