SOON TO BE A SERIES FROM APPLE TV!A New York Times BestsellerThe revered New York Times bestselling author returns with a novel set in 1960s Baltimore that combines modern psychological insights with elements of classic noir, about a middle-aged housewife turned aspiring reporter who pursues the murder of a forgotten young woman. In 1966, Baltimore is a city of secrets that everyone seems to … psychological insights with elements of classic noir, about a middle-aged housewife turned aspiring reporter who pursues the murder of a forgotten young woman.
In 1966, Baltimore is a city of secrets that everyone seems to know—everyone, that is, except Madeline “Maddie” Schwartz. Last year, she was a happy, even pampered housewife. This year, she’s bolted from her marriage of almost twenty years, determined to make good on her youthful ambitions to live a passionate, meaningful life.
Maddie wants to matter, to leave her mark on a swiftly changing world. Drawing on her own secrets, she helps Baltimore police find a murdered girl—assistance that leads to a job at the city’s afternoon newspaper, the Star. Working at the newspaper offers Maddie the opportunity to make her name, and she has found just the story to do it: Cleo Sherwood, a missing woman whose body was discovered in the fountain of a city park lake.
If Cleo were white, every reporter in Baltimore would be clamoring to tell her story. Instead, her mysterious death receives only cursory mention in the daily newspapers, and no one cares when Maddie starts poking around in a young Black woman’s life—except for Cleo’s ghost, who is determined to keep her secrets and her dignity. Cleo scolds the ambitious Maddie: You’re interested in my death, not my life. They’re not the same thing.
Maddie’s investigation brings her into contact with people that used to be on the periphery of her life—a jewelry store clerk, a waitress, a rising star on the Baltimore Orioles, a patrol cop, a hardened female reporter, a lonely man in a movie theater. But for all her ambition and drive, Maddie often fails to see the people right in front of her. Her inability to look beyond her own needs will lead to tragedy and turmoil for all sorts of people—including Ferdie, the man who shares her bed, a police officer who is risking far more than Maddie can understand.
more
Laura Lippman has outdone herself with this twisty tale of the Baltimore of yesteryear. I grew up in Maryland and remember these days so well.
If you’ve read much Lippman, you’re going to be surprised by this very different outing. And I will agree with some reviewers who say this is slower going than her usual–and masterful–suspense outings, but I urge you to STICK WITH IT. In the end, and by the end, this is a very rewarding read. Lippman plumbs emotional depths here she never has before and this book is extremely moving. And don’t for second think she doesn’t have a few unexpected twists and turns in store for you. Highly recommended.
Favorite Quotes:
It was like that first great work of art that transfixes you, that novel that stays with you the rest of your life, even if you go on to read much better ones.
Within a year, she was engaged to Milton Schwartz, big and hairy and older, twenty-two to her eighteen, his first year of law school already behind him. I went to their wedding. It was like watching Alice Faye run away with King Kong.
The detectives, who seemed to find everything about her mildly hilarious, had shrugged, told her that motives were for Perry Mason.
Another blue-eyed brunette would indicate that she was just a type, whereas a wispy blonde would suggest that he would never quite get over her, that she would be with him forever, sort of like chickenpox.
My Review:
Baltimore in 1966 – a completely unfamiliar locale and a lifetime away; I was a child in the sixties so I have only a vague awareness of some of the events and icons mentioned. And I should not fail to mention that laws and societal expectations were vastly more limiting, confining, and even dangerous for women and minorities.
While reading and even upon reaching the last page, I was conflicted in how to assess and rate this uniquely constructed, captivating, and complicated opus. It was like an oddly choreographed symphony consisting of numerous instruments and movements that couldn’t be fully appreciated or heard until assimilated and meshed together. Only in those final pages did the separate notes weave together to reveal the clarity and understanding of how brilliantly contrived the entirety had been.
I kid you not, while compelling and original, this wasn’t an easy read as the myriad POV and meaty storylines were robust and somewhat labor-intensive to hold together. The ingeniously diabolical Laura Lippman led me on a merry chase, and while somewhat addled and even exasperated at times my interest never flagged as the intensely captivating breadcrumbs and mysterious undercurrents constantly tickled my gray matter. It was mesmerizing and well-worthy of a 5-Star rating.
The recipe: A dead young black woman and a dead young white girl. Investigating: a middle-aged white woman who leaves her husband and child in 1960’s Baltimore to pursue her own life as a journalist. Add roughly 20 point-of-view characters, one of whom is the ghost of the black woman. Wow. It takes an author of exceptional talent and considerable confidence to bring this off. It’s a murder mystery folded neatly into a sophisticated novel of female empowerment and male intransigence. Which is not to say that the protagonist Maddie Schwartz is faultless. Far from it. She leaves carnage, emotional and otherwise, in her wake. Longtime readers may remember Raymond Chandler’s “The Lady in the Lake,” a Philip Marlowe tale that involves two missing women. I yield to no one in my admiration of Chandler, but Lippman’s novel is far more ambitious. She is at her stellar best and, naturally enough, she finishes with a double twist dismount that Olympic judges would mark 10.0.
I really enjoyed this book as historical fiction. The characters aren’t likeable but they are certainly inhabiting the world of mid-sixties Baltimore successfully.
Laura Lippman is just one of the best writers out there. Her prose is lyrical; her characters live and breathe. I think I’ve read everything she’s written and here she’s at the top of her game.
As a reader, the opening was so slow moving that I nearly put it down. I never put books down. I’m glad I didn’t because everything finally coalesced in the third act. As a writer, and for readers who love deep characters, this is a masterpiece. For story lovers … it has twists in the story that don’t pay off for so long they feel made up to answer an editor’s question. But the characters are deep and that excuses a lot.
“Lady in the Lake” by Laura Lippman opens with an unusual narrative that sets up the story in a compelling way.
“1964 God knows, my death has changed me. Alive, I was Cleo Sherwood. Dead, I became the Lady in the Lake, a nasty broken thing, dragged from the fountain after steeping there for months,”
This book is not really the story of “The lady in the lake,” but of Maddie Schwartz, the woman who found her and gave her that name. Maddie lived in Baltimore, embracing the Jewish family traditions and cultural norms of the time. She was good at entertaining and took particular pride in her ability to throw together a dinner party with almost no warning. Every day, Maddie was a little less beautiful than she had been the day before. Every moment she lived, she also was dying.
Maddie was a woman in search of an identity. She had a brain, but it had almost atrophied from lack of use, and she wanted to use it. Readers follow her struggle for identity, growth, and self-assurance for just over one year, from October 1965 through November 1966. Feelings, comments, and attitudes reflect the societal norms of the times. This is the foundation of the book, but there is more, much more to this story.
Maddie’s acquaintances saw a peculiarity. “I don’t know what it is about you and dead people, Maddie, but it’s getting out of hand. Can’t you find another way to get ahead?”
Alternate chapters set this story apart from a traditional narrative and each chapter identifies the speaker. Maddie Schwartz ties all these people together; they all fall within her sphere of influence. They interact with her; they have some connection to her. These chapters tell the story in the first person present tense, as if characters are speaking to an unseen interrogator, speaking directly to the reader, and telling their version of events. Readers get to know the participants, what they think and how they feel about themselves and others. The exceptions, of course, are the conversations of “The lady in the Lake” herself; she speaks to readers but she mostly talks to Maddie Schwartz.
Mattie exemplifies motivation for writers of mysteries, “How many larger crimes lurked in the city’s petty complaints?”
I received a copy of “Lady in the Lake” from Laura Lippman and HarperCollins Publishers. Its exceptional narrative organization and plot structure make it a favorite for readers. It captured my attention of and drew me into the story until the very unusual and surprising end.
“I’m painting a picture of myself painting a picture of myself painting a picture of myself. The picture goes on and on, the words go on and on, until they make no sense, until the picture is so tiny that you can’t see anything at all.“
Compelling, with close observations of human nature that are both insightful and touching. I thought about this novel long after finishing it.
As always, Lippman delivers. The reader enters the world of Maddie Schwartz, not sure of what she’s doing in there–It’s the 60’s, she up and leaves her nice husband and son, and takes up with a black Baltimore cop. Intermittently, the reader is visited by the ghost of a black woman found in a local fountain….The imagination of Laura Lippman shines in LADY IN THE LAKE, a suspenseful page-turner with a dash of wry humor. The book kept this fan propped on the pillows for hours….reading, reading, reading.
Not the best I have read by Laura Lippmann, but still good. She sets this book in the 1960’s in Baltimore. Maddie is married but not truly happy. So she leaves and finds herself trying to become a reporter. I believe she has trying to find herself.
Acclaimed, best-selling author Laura Lippman uses a real-life unsolved drowning as the springboard for her new thriller, set in Baltimore in the turbulent mid-1960’s.
The world is changing rapidly. Societal norms are being challenged. And thirty-seven-year-old Maddie Schwartz is no longer content to sit on the sidelines in her comfortable home with her dull, but reliable husband, Milton, and seventeen-year-old son, Seth. Maddie did what was expected of her — she married an attorney, keeps a kosher home, cares for her son, and hopes that no one ever finds out about the dark secret she harbors. Before she married Milton, she did not always conform.
When Milton brings home the local television reporter — a man Maddie knew in high school — something snaps and she realizes she needs to pursue the dreams she abandoned in favor of stability and acceptance. She leaves Milton, and rents an apartment downtown in a neighborhood that is suffering the ravages of “white flight” to suburbia. Seth refuses to join her there. An one day, the always-clever Maddie devises a scheme to improve her circumstances that has far-reaching consequences she could never have anticipated.
Meanwhile, the body of a young woman lies submersed in the fountain situated in the park surrounding a local lake. She is a missing person that no one is actually looking for, a young African-American woman who left her two young sons, fathered by two different men, with her parents to raise while she worked in the notorious Flamingo Club, tending bar and performing other duties better left unmentioned. She visits her sons and parents, brings them gifts, and leaves again, much to the dismay of her parents.
When Maddie and a friend discover the body of a missing eleven-year-old girl, she schemes to find a way to parlay her luck into a job as a reporter at the Baltimore Star. She gets a job, although not as a reporter, but will not be satisfied until she reaches her goal. She understands all too well that men control her destiny and will use any means necessary, including flirtation and trust of those who provide her tips, to achieve her goal.
Lippman knows Baltimore. She spent twelve years as a reporter at the Baltimore Sun. Ironically, she says that she didn’t set out to write a book in which much of the action is focused around a newspaper, noting that “Maddie Schartz surprised me as much as she surprised her longtime husband.” Soon Lippman found herself interviewing her father’s colleagues — Theo Lippman Jr. was a journalist at the Baltimore Sun beginning in 1965 — in order to get the details just right. Lady in the Lake is replete with historical and geographical references not just to the era, but Baltimore specifically. She even includes two real-lie people as characters in the book: the first African-American police officer in Baltimore, Violet Wilson Whyte who was known as Lady Law, and Oriole centerfielder Paul Blair.
The story is told by a series of narrators, primarily the lady in the lake herself and Maddie. But as Maddie encounters other characters, they are called upon to narrate the next chapter. Some reoccur, some only briefly contribute to the plot’s progression. Lippman uses their voices to great effect to supply historical significance, context, and perspectives that balance Maddie’s increasingly obsessive, and at times quite selfish, quest for the truth. Through her eclectic group of storytellers, Lippman explores not just the two killings, but racism, classism, and sexism, as well as the price that unbridled ambition can extract — especially from a woman.
Lady in the Lake is a sophisticated and absorbing tale about a time and place not all that long ago that will leave readers pondering how much America has changed in the intervening years.
Thanks to NetGalley for an Advance Reader’s Copy of the book.
Lady in the Lake has a lot going on—a woman who suddenly makes changes in her life to fulfill a life long dream, a dead woman who just wants to be left alone, motherhood, murder, corruption, newspaper stories, racial issues, secrets—like I said, a lot.
But all of that made for a compelling story that drew me in and held my interest until the very end. Maddie became a character that I cared about and I wanted her to succeed, in life and with her story. And I loved the fact that the timeline was set in the 60’s. That gave it a whole different, interesting flavor.
I am never disappointed by a Laura Lippman story and I always know I’m in for a treat when I start one of her books. Lady in the Lake is a definite read for anyone who likes mysteries, thrillers, and historical stories.
This is an amazing book. It’s a murder mystery in a way, but in between the main character finding her way to the answer, we hear from nearly every character she runs in to, their story, their issues, their frustrations, even though we don’t encounter them again. This more or less violates most rules of writing but it’s so interesting, you won’t care. Not only because it’s set in 1966 so things are very different than today, but because it’s a master class in two tenets: Everyone is the hero of their own story, and everyone has a passionately desired agenda/goal.
I really enjoyed this story. Maddie Schwartz is strong and independent. She has a drive like no other. I was cheering her on the entire time hoping that she could finally get her byline. While not shocking but still sad, Cleo, a black woman, goes missing in Boston 1960’s. I was so devastated that no one seemed to care, even though it’s not entirely surprising based on time and location. This book had me captivated and begging for answers.
Mrs/Miss Morganstern’s constant push against the norms of mid century society combined with a mysterious death makes an original and entertaining read.
This novel has a very interesting structure, introducing the reader to the lives of many different characters, giving each of them at least one chapter where they shine. At the same time it never loses sight of the hero, a woman whose struggles and strength mirror those of many women of that era (including my mother!).
Lippman is a wonderful author but this book meandered, and most of the characters were rather unlikeable. A swing and a miss.
Another hit by Laura Lippmann.
I’m a huge fan of Laura Lippman. She never disappoints. I enjoyed this book as I do all of her books.