Lady In The Lake: A Novel

"Laura Lippman has created something special with this novel: a mystery that manages to be deliciously discursive without ever losing its driving narrative momentum. Lippman accomplishes this by telling the story through a clever mix of voices – a third-person window on her protagonist Madeline “Maddie” Schwartz, a Jewish housewife who abandons her purportedly idyllic existence in suburban 1960s Baltimore to become a reporter; first-person interludes from Cleo Sherman, the sardonic ghost of the young black woman whose mysterious but ignored death Maddie decides to look into; and, in Lippman’s coup de grace, one-off first-person chapters from the perspective of the wide array of characters Maddie encounters throughout her investigation. The result is a richly nuanced portrait of Baltimore in a time of upheaval that also happens to be a page-turning mystery with a deeply satisfying conclusion."