Our protagonist is Amber Glass — like her name, both prismatic and transparent — a woman “so good at secrets that she had managed to keep one from herself.” Amber resents having taken on the burden of the blame for the crime, even if the baby’s father, Joe, didn’t know she was pregnant at the time. The book follows the lingering consequences of the birth and death of their child. Joe, a weak, hapless guy, goes on to become successful in real estate. His wife is Meredith, a cool and competent plastic surgeon; he also has a lover at the office named Jordan. Newspapers covering the crime (in real life and the novel) dubbed him “cad dad,” and no wonder.

Review: ‘Lady in the Lake,’ by Laura Lippman

After being released from prison, Amber returns to their hometown in the carefully described suburbs north of Baltimore. Our — shall we call them star-crossed? — couple circles and narrowly misses each other, then finally connects. But this is no romance novel. As the pandemic descends and problems mount, the story picks up pace and intensity, moving into the realm of a thriller as all three become implicated in a crime caper — an insurance scam that evolves into a murder-for-hire scheme.

Moving between past and present, Lippman builds the stories of her main characters. None are especially deep — or sympathetic. They share a bougie preoccupation with material things — countertops and porte-cocheres — that feels at odds with the crime in which they are implicated. (After a few close descriptions of kitchen layouts, I began to feel as if I was reading a thriller as written by Nora Ephron.) Toward the end, the reader may feel a bit cheated by what has apparently occurred off the page. Although pulling the camera away is a time-tested technique for setting up a great twist, it feels almost unfair that readers are privy to quiet conversations among these characters while they’re parked in parallel cars outside the Starbucks drive-through, but are left out of the true moments of revelation and reversal.

In a few more years, perhaps, the granular details of pandemic-era life on display in “Prom Mom” may take on the glamour of historical fiction, especially in the subtle ways couples used quarantine to coerce and manipulate each other. (In her acknowledgments, Lippman shares that the pandemic was the end of her marriage, and we feel that in these pages.) But Lippman, who delivered a similar kaleidoscope of perspectives in “Lady in the Lake” (soon to be an Apple TV Plus limited series starring Natalie Portman), here leaves readers so distanced from her soulless characters that they may not care enough to root for any of them.

Eliza Nellums is the author of “All That’s Bright and Gone” and “The Bone Cay.”

William Morrow. 320 pp. $30