Maddie Schwartz - recently separated from her husband, working her first job as an assistant at the Baltimore Sun wants one thing: a byline.

It isn't hard to understand why: it's 1966 and neither the police, the public nor the papers care much when Negro women go missing. Aside from her parents and the two sons she left behind, no one seems to have noticed. And is kinda clever.Ĭleo Sherwood disappeared eight months ago. It could be confusing, but it actually works well. And here, in her latest standalone, she adopts the interesting approach of introducing a lot – like lots and lots – of narrators…. In my review of Sunburn I note that Lippman is vague about the timing of plot elements so is able to keep we readers guessing. Another chance event has her playing a part in the discovery of a young black woman’s disintegrating corpse in a fountain the victim is identified as Cleo Sherwood, dubbed “the lady in the lake” by the press.I’ve long been a fan of Laura Lippman: her standalone novels as well as her (reporter-turned-PI) Tess Monaghan series. When a suspect is arrested for murder, Maddie writes to the accused man, and the prisoner responds with two letters containing incriminating information that Maddie parlays into an entry-level newspaper job. Sure enough, it’s Maddie who finds Tessie’s body near a wooded area. “I want to do something with my life.” While she works to obtain a divorce, Maddie decides to help look for Tessie Fine, a missing little girl whom the whole city has been searching for.

“I don’t think I’m the person I was meant to be,” she tries to explain to her teenage son once she has moved out of the family home and into her own apartment. A social encounter with an old schoolmate turned local TV news host makes Maddie aware of how unfulfilled she feels as a housewife and mother-and so she abruptly flees her marriage. The times they are a-changin’, and 36-year-old Madeline Schwartz wants to change with them. Photo: Hedrich Blessing Collection/Chicago History Museum/Getty Imagesīaltimore in the mid-1960s is the setting of “Lady in the Lake” (Morrow, 340 pages, $26.99), the latest novel from the ever impressive Laura Lippman. The Highfield House courtyard in Baltimore, 1965.

Laura lippman lady in the lake review