The Best Books of 2007

What the Dead Know
by Laura Lippman
William Morrow, 376 pp., $24.95
Though Lippman is best known to contemporary crime-fiction buffs as author of the quirky, low-key Tess Monaghan series, it's her too-infrequent, superior stand-alone novels that assure her place in the pantheon. What the Dead Know tells of the sudden, seemingly inexplicable reappearance of one of a pair of teenage sisters who went missing at a suburban shopping mall decades ago. (LD BEGHTOL)