Laura Lippman's serial in the New York Times Magazine's "Funny Pages" section, "The Girl in the Green Raincoat," wrapped up last week. In it, the Baltimore author placed her PI, Tess Monaghan, in a very "Rear Window" sort of predicament, confining her to bed with a high-risk pregnancy thanks to preeclampsia. Tess spends her days killing time, including stints where she simply looks out the window at the park across the way. There, she spies the girl in the green raincoat and her greyhound. One day, the dog is there, but the girl is not, and Tess has a mystery on her idle hands.

Over the course of 15 2,500-word chapters, Lippman spins out an intriguing tale. She does fun things with the challenge of a protagonist who cannot move, bringing people into Tess's orbit -- best friend Whitney Talbot, boyfriend Crow and associate Mrs. Blossom -- who help drive the story forward with their actions. It's a fun read that offers a vicarious thrill, for Tess is in some ways a proxy for mystery readers who must rely on the actions of others to bring things to a resolution.

Tess's predicament took on resonance in the final two chapters as the fate of the girl in the green raincoat is revealed at the same time Tess begins to feel a sharp pain that leads to a hospital visit. Then, that which since the story's opening pages had felt like a device to keep Tess immobile came back to a place of primacy in the narrative: preeclampsia.

In the story's final chapter, Lippman uses Tess's situation to address a whole host of issues, including working motherhood, babies born out of wedlock, the advanced age at which many women are having children and, most important to me, the challenged faced by women with high-risk pregnancy. I won't spoil the story for those who haven't yet had the pleasure, but let me just say this: Lippman got it right. I have personal experience (or rather, spousal experience) with preeclampsia. Tess ends up in a neonatal intensive care unit and shares the sights and sounds. "Some families triumphed and took their children home," she writes. "New families arrived to take their place. And some families — well, some families Tess just didn’t want to think about."

Four years ago, mine was one of those families, losing our son -- born at 24 weeks because my wife had preeclampsia -- after a valiant 12-week struggle in the NICU. We diligently reported Will's story on a blog, thus raising the profile of preeclampsia among our friends and others who came across the site, for a few months. My wife and I often would wonder why we didn't hear more about the condition. Surely some starlet somewhere who's every move is reported in the tabloids has faced this, right? But save for efforts by the likes of the March of Dimes and the Preeclampsia Foundation, it's one that goes largely unnoticed.

So, I thank Lippman for giving it a higher profile, if only for a short while. She has done more here, entertaining readers for 15 weeks with another fine story of Tess and her meandering path through her life and career, but she also has done something special by using that bully pulpit to create awareness.

Labels: crime fiction, newspapers