After I'm Gone

After I'm Gone is a crime novel by the American writer Laura Lippman, published in 2014.

It begins with a meeting. Felix Brewer charms Bernadette Gottschalk, who is known as Bambi, at a Valentine's Day dance in 1959, and makes her a set of wild promises, some of which he actually keeps. His businesses are lucrative and not all of them are legal, and they keep Bambi and their three small daughters in comfort until the Fourth of July in 1976, when Felix, newly convicted and facing prison, vanishes.

Bambi has no idea where her husband or his money has gone, but she suspects that one woman does, and that woman is his mistress, Julie. Ten years to the day after Felix went on the run, Julie disappears as well, and everyone assumes she has gone to join him, until her remains are eventually found.

Twenty-six years after Julie went missing, Roberto Sanchez, a retired Baltimore detective who works cold cases for extra money, looks into her murder. What he finds is a tangle stretching back over three decades and connecting five women, with the missing man, Felix Brewer, at the middle of it, and what he works out changes the lives of everyone still caught up in the case.