"God pity them both! and pity us all, / Who vainly the dreams of youth recall." This is the epigraph by John Greenleaf Whittier at the beginning of Laura Lippman's latest stand-alone novel. "The dreams of youth" imbue THE MOST DANGEROUS THING, as does the notion of recalling, of memory itself. How do the traumatic events of childhood shape the rest of our lives? What truths do we obscure? What lies do we tell, even to ourselves? These are the questions that arise again and again in this haunting, many-layered novel.
"Freely moving back and forth between past