Review: 'Lady in the Lake'

Lady in the Lake
By Laura Lippman
Fiction
July 2019
William Morrow
ISBN: 978-0062390011

A white woman on the brink of middle age realizes she is settled into her staid, perfect-on-the-outside life, her son nearly grown and nothing else to show for all those years. So she moves out, wants a divorce and decides her life needs to count for something. What she decides on, after helping find the body of a murdered child, is that she needs to be a newspaper writer.

Maddie Schwartz is not the only voice from Baltimore in 1966 in Laura Lippman's latest, remarkable novel. The first voice we see is that of the woman who becomes known as the Lady in the Lake, a younger black woman whose body is found in a city lake. Apparently the ghost of the young woman, Cleo Sherwood, doesn't want justice or revenge. She tells Maddie her snooping will only bring trouble.

Even as Maddie searches for a scoop as her way into a regular newspaper job, she misses stories all around her. Lippman shows the reader this over and over again, as each person whose path Maddie crosses gets at least one chapter to tell his or her story. Sometimes it's their view of what just happened, sometimes that's just the starting point of a snapshot version of their lives or to fill in something the reader will want to know.

Every single voice adds to the reader's knowledge of the Baltimore Maddie inhabits and the other Baltimores she doesn't know. Each one tells the reader about lives well lived and lives wasted.

Lippman's experience as a newspaper reporter, the daughter of a Baltimore Sun writer who worked at the paper during the era of her novel, and as a writer of mysteries and thrillers, brings expertise in the storytelling. This is true whether it's the telling detail or the connection of one character to another.

What Lippman knows and shows, however, Maddie does not. She misses every other story that is basically not about her. Even in trying to find out about the woman whose body was in the lake, even when she discovers the victim's name was Cleo to some and Eunetta to her family, Maddie is writing about herself.

And that trouble the ghost tried to warn Maddie about? It's coming. And when it does, others around Maddie could be the ones most affected.

As both a thriller and a look at writers and at the past of a city she loves, Lady in the Lake is an ode by Lippman to Baltimore and to journalism. It's an engrossing novel of many stories.

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