BOOK REVIEW: Lady in the Lake by Laura Lippman @tlcbooktours @wmmorrowbooks @lauramlippman #ladyinthelake

Laura Lippman’s Lady in the Lake is without question one of the most engrossing, thought-provoking mysteries I’ve read in the past year. I honestly can’t stop thinking about it and though I just finished, I already want to read Lady in the Lake again. The way this novel was crafted is brilliant and captivating!

About the Book

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: a missing woman whose body was discovered in the fountain of a city park lake.

Cleo Sherwood was a young African-American woman who liked to have a good time. No one seems to know or care why she was killed except Maddie–and the dead woman herself. Maddie’s going to find the truth about Cleo’s life and death. Cleo’s ghost, privy to Maddie’s poking and prying, wants to be left alone.

Maddie’s investigation brings her into contact with people that used to be on the periphery of her life–a jewelery 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 the man who shares her bed, a black police officer who cares for Maddie more than she knows.

Reflection

I went into reading this book pretty blind. I saw that it involved a mystery, a journalist, and a female lead and I grabbed it before really even reading the full synopsis. From right at the beginning of the book, this was so special to me. The lead character Maddie Schwartz is completely captivating. She is not perfect—she is actually far from perfect. But she is also this incredible feminist icon, emerging throughout the book as a strong, ambitious woman who transforms as the book unfolds.

One of my favorite small moments (which has nothing to do with the main plot and is not a spoiler, I swear!) was a passage where Maddie thought about how her teenage self would catalog encounters with males. And then she talks about how in retrospect, she catalogued what she let males do to her, rather than what she wanted to do with males. It is such a relatable moment in the story, having been a teenage girl myself. How many girls don’t realize that they can own that side of themselves until much later in life.

As the book opens, Maddie is the perfect housewife. But behind it, she’s so unhappy. There is nothing wrong with her husband. In fact, her husband is one of the more boring but decent males in the novel. But Milton wants a wife who is a typical housewife, hosting great dinner parties at a moment’s notice, sensual only in the missionary position, and wanting a progressively grander life as his success increases. By the next chapter (and a year in the future), Maddie has left him and is living on her own. Their separation isn’t drawn out. This is Maddie’s story and the focus is on her journey to find herself. And of course, along the way, she happens to pursue two captivating mysteries.

I loved how the cases were based on real life cases from the 1960s (a fact I actually didn’t realize until I read the author’s note at the end of the book). The cases are strikingly similar in some ways, two separate women go missing and are later found dead. However, one woman is black and the other is white. In Baltimore in the 1960s, the cases receive wildly different attention in the media.

The book itself touches on so many themes of racism, classism, gender inequity, and the stigma of aging. The murdered women are young, whereas Maddie is constantly battling a stigma that at 37, she is too old to be starting to build the life she wants. Particularly from men, and men in journalism—a space she tries hard to break into only to be treated like a secretary for much of the novel. And one who was only hired, according to some other characters, because she is beautiful.

I’m hesitant to say too much about the two main mysteries and how the story unfolds for Maddie, because I found that every time I picked this book up, I wanted to go slow and savor each tiny turn of the story. There is so much for the reader to discover and think about while reading this story. And all of that combines with some truly fantastic twists.

I do want to note though, before wrapping up, that I found the narrative structure to this novel to be one of the most compelling and unique I’ve read. Maddie is by far the main character, but chapters are narrated by other people. The man in love with Maddie in high school, for instance, who is the catalyst for the dinner party in the first chapter, only to then become the voice of his own chapter. At first I thought that all narrators would be recurring and alternate—a much more common use of multiple narrators.

But the reality is that most of the alternate narrators had only one chapter, directly after Maddie interacts with them in a pivotal way, where we see the story briefly back track and then progress from their point of view. In a way, this was what made Maddie even more compelling, seeing both her point of view and then glimpses of how others see her and what they perceive about her. This structure was absolutely brilliant. Part of the reason I want to read the book again is to pull out nuggets from these other narrators that now have more meaning once I read the book. Who does have the best read on Maddie, and who saw only the beautiful exterior of Maddie?

A brilliant book that is a must-read for those looking for a complex, thought-provoking mystery. Thank you TLC Book Tours for my copy. Opinions are my own.