Onyx reviews: Lady in the Lake by Laura Lippman

Reviewed by Bev Vincent, 04/14/2019

Maddie Schwartz's first real close encounter with journalism occurs when her husband Milton invites a local news presenter to dinner. Maddie knew Wally in school, when the pimple-faced teen, two years her junior, yearned after her. The dinner is a pivotal moment for Maddie. She doesn't immediately abandon her life for a career as a journalist—that transition occurs somewhat later—but she does decide she has fallen out of love with her husband two years before they experience the empty nest.

Maddie moves into a tawdry apartment, eking out a meager existence funded primarily by a sporadic and unreliable allowance from Milton, who can't understand why she would want to give up their life of privilege and luxury. To bolster her finances, she fakes a robbery, claiming her wedding ring was stolen so she can claim the insurance money and pawn the ring. This brings her into contact with Ferdie Platt, a black policeman who becomes her regular lover, on the down low. In Maryland in 1966, it was still illegal for a black man and a white woman to marry.

Bored and listless, Maddie and a friend attempt to join the organized search for a missing girl, Tessie Fine. However, women aren't welcome so they strike out on their own. Through luck and intuition, Maddie stumbles upon the body and becomes, for a while, central to the investigation. A suspect because the people who find bodies often are, but also a person of interest to journalists.

Feeling she shares a bond with him, Maddie writes to the with the man accused of killing Tessie. In his responses, he reveals details that Maddie realizes will help convict him. She parlays that information into a job at the Baltimore Star. Not as a journalist—she has no experience and, at 37, is older than most entry-level people in that career—but as an aide to a columnist who responds to complaints from the public. She handles by phone the letters that are deemed too minor to see print.

One such letter puts Maddie in the middle of another criminal case: the body of a young woman who disappeared months earlier is found in a city park lake when a public works official responds to the complaint of a broken light in the fountain. The victim was black and there's no clear evidence she was murdered, so there's little public interest in the story. Maddie, though, is determined to find out what happens and pursues leads on her own.

Inspired by a real, unsolved case from the late 1960s, Lippman has adopted an interesting approach in Lady in the Lake. The chapters detailing Maddie's experiences are in third person. Most are followed by a first-person chapter from the perspective of someone she has just encountered, giving the novel nearly twenty point-of-view characters. This diverse cast of individuals, each with a distinct and distinctive voice, explain who they are and comment in some fashion on their recent meeting with Maddie, like a Greek chorus. Often they reveal information Maddie will never learn. These individuals range from a young boy to a restaurant waitress to a psychic to a murder suspect.

In addition, there are periodic chapters from the point of view of Cleo Sherwood, the eponymous Lady in the Lake. Cleo and Maddie passed each other on the street one day, although Maddie was never aware of the close encounter. In a style reminiscent of The Lovely Bones, Cleo addresses Maddie throughout the novel, chastising her for "rattling doorknobs" and creating problems for people who would have been better off if left alone.

In addition to diving deep into the world of journalism in the 1960s, the novel explores many of the issues Baltimore faced at the time: gentrification, white flight, the limited careers of black police officers and women of any color, urban and suburban politics.

Maddie is caught in the middle, trying to find her own voice and identity in a male-centric and rapidly changing world. For all readers may sympathize with her plight, she is so self-absorbed that she rarely pauses to consider the implications of her actions on others. She becomes estranged from her son, jeopardizes her lover's career for the sake of her own and, ultimately, puts her own life on the line in pursuit of a byline and the promotion that might ensue if she gets the big story. It is particularly ironic that when Maddie finally learns the truth about what happened to Cleo, she cannot tell another living soul about it, the worst situation a journalist could ever face.