Lady in the Lake is a whodunit with finely drawn characters. I picked it up after hearing author Laura Lippman on Fresh Air.

Baltimore. 1966. Recently separated Maddie Schwartz finds the body of teen Tessie Fine while out searching with a “friend” and the reader fears her life is about to tumble like a house of cards.

Yet it is those whom she investigates and those who help her as she tries to make it as a reporter who seem to pay the price.

This book was a surprise. First, while I thoroughly enjoyed it from start to finish, I wasn’t expecting the ending at all.

Second, the reader sees so many different perspectives. It’s hard to have any sympathy for Maddie until her big reveal towards the end because you see how she’s hurting so many people.

This book is quite remarkable in that it essentially states outright the subtext of many other books: it’s not OK to hurt other people no matter how badly you’ve been hurt in your own life. Maddie experienced something that would today be illegal as a girl, but that doesn’t excuse how she uses her privilege (white and wealthy) to steal the dreams of others.

Excuse me while I make my way through the entire back catalog of Laura Lippman.

This is a great book! Laura Lippman is a great author and I have enjoyed many of her books in the past and this one did not fail me! I love the chance to read and review this and it was a great story! Thanks!! I recommend this to everyone!

Just one evening with an old school friend and Maddie’s life is not what it was anymore. Her life with her husband Milton and their son Seth simply isn’t what she wants anymore and so she makes a courageous decision for the year 1966: she leaves. Now completely on her own, she wants to make real another dream: becoming a journalist and when she, by pure chance, comes across the body of a young girl and soon after again of a woman, she seizes the opportunity of her first contact with the press. It is especially the second case of the “Lady in the Lake” as she was named that turns in her mind. Nobody seems to be really care about who murdered Cleo Sherwood, just because Cleo was black. Maddie knows that there must be a story behind it and that this can be her chance to really become a reporter.

Laura Lippman’s novel is one of the most talked about books of 2019 and it only takes a couple of pages to understand why all this praise is more than justified. “Lady in the Lake” is the perfect combination of a crime novel and the story of a woman who follows her will and is brave enough to do this against all societal conventions. The setting is all but favourable for such an undertaking and Lippman’s lively portrait of Baltimore of the 1960s underlines with which severe consequences such an attitude came in these days.

The most outstanding aspect of the novel is surely the protagonist. Maddie Schwartz is the perfect Jewish housewife – until she isn’t anymore. She remembers the young woman she once was, surely a bit stubborn, but to put it positively: she knew what she wanted and she got it. So why should she be pleased with the second best life? She definitely is a bit naive, but her sympathetic authenticity is the key to the people and this makes her story convincing and plausible. Times were harsh, above all for black people and the novel gives a good impression of what this meant in everyday life. It is not an open accusation of segregation and the different kind of treatment of people of colour or even a political statement, but simply a fact and thus an integral part of what the characters experience.

I also liked the constant change of perspective and how Lippman integrated different points of view which also gives a good idea of someone like Maddie was perceived in her time. This also make the narrative lively and varied. I had some high expectations due to the masses of admiring reviews I had read, but nevertheless, the novel surpassed them easily.

I was very excited to be able to read Laura Lippman's latest book from NetGalley.

I found Lady in the Lake to be different from Lippman's previous books in a few ways, namely, that it is narrated by a full cast of characters, and also because it takes place in the 1960s. The main character, Maddie Schwartz, is a 37 year old housewife who suddenly decides to leave her husband and teenage son and move from the 'burbs to the city of Baltimore, and after helping to discover the body of a missing child, decides to become a journalist. The story is told mainly from Maddie's perspective, but after each chapter, there is a chapter told by one of the people she has just interacted with. This keeps the story fresh and offers a variety of perspectives. Maddie, as a new journalist, decides she will not rest until she solves the murder of the Lady in the Lake. This is a difficult if not impossible task because no one takes her seriously and she has none of the connections and sources that other journalists have. Will she be able to solve the Lady in the Lake's murder?

I really enjoyed this book and I love the fact that in the afterword, Lippman says that she was at least partially inspired by the story of her father, who worked at a newspaper in the 1960s.

*Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for my Advanced Readers Copy in exchange for this honest review!*

This was a great read. Crime thriller come historical fiction come racial and class divide, it really had it all. Maddie is questioning it all in a sort of mid-life crisis. She feels unfulfilled by her house Wife life in 1960s Baltimore so she leaves her husband and takes a job with a local newspaper. She helps the police with their investigation into the murder of a young girl before turning her attention to the murder of an African American party girl Cleo Sherwood. Nobody else seems to be paying her much attention so she takes it upon herself to get to the bottom of the case.
This is a great read which touches all class of society. It kept me glued throughout. I would highly recommend this novel and am really looking forward now to reading Sunburn, also by Laura Lippman which gets great reviews.

4.5 stars
I love the 1960’s as a setting in a novel and this was no exception. It’s 1960s Baltimore, women’s roles are changing and racial tensions are high. The author nails time and place expertly and makes them come to life.

Maddie Schwartz wants more than her privileged life as the housewife of a successful businessman and mother to her teenage son. She decides to leaves her family and start over. This is a risky choice for an author as it doesn’t make Maddie the most likable of characters. However, even though I would make different choices than Maddie, I grew to understand her.

After finding the body of a murdered 11-year-old girl she pursues a career as a crime reporter at a local newspaper where she learns of a missing young black woman. Maddie decides to pursue leads and do some investigating on her own. The juxtaposition of the public and police interest in the murder of the young white girl vs their complete disinterest in the black woman highlights the injustices of the times. But make no mistake, this is not a book written solely to highlight a hot button social issue, it’s a well-written book that happens to have a social issue within its pages. The difference is important as I tend to detest ‘big important issue books’.

Each chapter is told from a different POV, including that of the missing black woman. I loved this unique format. Like a puzzle with interlocking pieces, we are given information from all the supporting characters who are connected to the crimes.

Lippman herself worked as a reporter and this book is inspired on true events that happened in Baltimore in 1969, which accounts for the authenticity of the story.

I love Laura Lippman’s writing style which is smart and engaging. I loved last year’s Sunburn and will be anxiously awaiting next year’s release.

I received Lady in the Lake by Laura Lippman as an ARC from NetGalley. I'm a huge Laura Lippman fan and I've read all of her books. Lady in the Lake was not one of my favorites by Lippman but I still enjoyed it. The story is set in Baltimore in the 1960s and deals with racial tensions and the inequality that women dealt with in the workplace. Maddie Schwartz is a Jewish woman who leaves her husband, rents a small apartment in a questionable area of town and starts a relationship with a black cop. She also decides that she wants to become a newspaper journalist and sets out to solve the mystery of the Lady in the Lake. Maddie is not a very likable character and is full of flaws. The mystery kept me engrossed in the story. I look forward to more from Lippmann.

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for a ARC of this book. The only book I've previously read by Laura Lippman was Sunburn and once I saw that her latest release was on Netgalley, I immediately requested it. This book was a gripping take on 1960s Baltimore and racial tension set in the backdrop of a murder mystery. I personally enjoyed the style of writing in this book but I can see how it can be a bit difficult in the beginning for some. I would suggest if that is the case to continue reading the novel as it gets betters as it unfold. I would give it 3.5 stars.

This was a good story, but not one where anything really happens. No big car chases where Tess Monaghan solves the crime and catches the bad guy. Instead, it is a quiet book where Maddie, a Jewish woman in 1960s Baltimore, realizes that she is not happy following the path expected of her - marriage and a life of volunteering and entertaining her husband’s friends and clients. She leaves her husband and quickly gets involved with another man. He is black, which makes their relationship illegal, but he is also working class, which is harder for Maddie to accept.

It is a good telling of what life was like back then, in a time before Women’s Lib and racial equality gave us more options to live and love as we chose. It also deals with the difference in public outcry when a white girl goes missing compared to a black one. I don’t know if we have improved that situation as well as we should.

The character in the title is a body of a young black woman found in a fountain. Maddie, now a newspaper employee, (but not a reporter) tries to find out who the woman is and who put her there. To me this story was not as intriguing as seeing Maddie develop to become more of the woman she wanted to be rather than what was expected.

I missed the laughs and excitement of some of the author’s other works. I struggled to read it, especially as my “to be read” pile kept increasing.

Not my favorite by this author, but provided some insights

I loved this story. It followed no recognizable pattern -- not police procedural, not who-done-it, not terrifying thriller. At heart, it is a character study of a self-absorbed woman who is caught up in the sweeping changes of the 1960s in Baltimore. There is a murder or two, but the mystery is not about their killer(s).

When you have a main character as clueless and entitled as Maddie Schwartz, it helps to have other voices chime in to enrich our view of what's going on. The author introduces these other perspectives in alternating chapters, giving us such a generous glimpse of life in the mid-60s, with the tightly-slotted roles of prosperous Jews, of striving African Americans, of compliant women of all races-- and of the newspaper industry in which Maddie fights to gain a foothold.

Full disclosure: I may have loved it so much because I got my first newspaper job in the 1960s, and, yes, we few women had to wear skirts, girdles and hosiery ( and the stockings had to appear to have no tint!)

Lippman shows us all Maddie's flaws, but she is still a sympathetic character. Few readers will love her, but we understand her drive, even as we wince at the number of people she exploits. Reading about Maddie, I thought of an apt phrase from a Nadine Gortimer novel: "She had a deft hand with men."

It's not all about Maddie, though. The families of the two murder victims are fully portrayed, as are Maddie's co-workers and her lover. This is a rich and multi-layered story, with a strong base of suspense.

Thanks to NetGalley for an advance readers copy.

Most of my experience with Laura Lippman has been with the Tess Monaghan series. This was a departure, but not completely. The murder mystery wasn't what kept me reading. The style of writing kept me from being truly engaged in the story, or stories. They were cleaned up neatly at the end but they were never really that intriguing. It might have been because I didn't care for the main character. Maddie was annoying and self-centered. Instead, I liked the characters around her. Most people she met in passing go their own chapter. In that chapter we got to see how others saw Maddie. Those parts I enjoyed quite a bit. Some were just people in the story, including a baseball player attended in the book. Others, however, were characters more familiar to readers of other works of Lippman. That is what kept me reading.

Set in 1960s Baltimore, ripe with all the racism, sexism, and classism of the day, Lady in the Lake is a fascinating tour de force.
Told by a multitude of narrators, this novel is ultimately about two very different and at the same time very similar women. They both defied the mores of the day in order to live the lives they desperately wanted.
Highly recommended fir lovers of historical fiction, of crime novels — oh, heck, just highly recommended..

I was looking forward to discovering Laura Lippman, a writer I’ve been hearing quite a lot about. I was lucky enough to get this book through Netgalley. And I got a lot more than what I expected!

From the short presentation I got, the focus was on the victim: a young black waitress whose body is found in a fountain in 1966 Baltimore. The first unconventional thing is that we hear the victim talking to the person who investigated her death, and she’s not happy about it. I was hooked from the beginning, even though it’s not a fast-paced thriller.

I was surprised by the sharp turn the book took, as we hear from the woman who doggedly chases the truth: Madeline Schwartz. She is a bored, perfect Jewish housewife, but her dreams are bigger, and she soon leaves her husband of 20 years and her teenage son to live in a small apartment, take a lover and start her own career. By a combination of luck and determination, she puts the foot in the door at the local newspaper. She wants to be a reporter, but no-one takes her seriously, until she starts her investigations on her own and gets results.

I liked how Lippman describes the 1960s, its casual sexism and racism, the newspaper industry, and the changes that went through in that period. Madeline Schwartz is a great feminist heroin, but she is not the mouthpiece for 2019 thoughts. She is not always a nice person, and struggles to define what she wants her post-divorce life to be. But she’s aware of the numerous traps around her. The novel switches points of view with every section, making the book into a chorus of Baltimore characters, each with their own small or big backstory. The ending has several twists I hadn’t seen coming, and Madeline has still a lot of fights ahead of her.

I’ll be sure to check out other books by Lippman. Would you recommend one in particular?

I enjoyed this for the most part. While I think I understand what the author was trying to do with the multiple points of view, connecting them all to an event/person, I would have liked to hear more from them and less from the MC.

“Lady in the Lake” by Laura Lippman opens with an unusual narrative that sets up the story in a compelling way.
“1964 God knows, my death has changed me. Alive, I was Cleo Sherwood. Dead, I became the Lady in the Lake, a nasty broken thing, dragged from the fountain after steeping there for months,”
This book is not really the story of “The lady in the lake,” but of Maddie Schwartz, the woman who found her and gave her that name. Maddie lived in Baltimore, embracing the Jewish family traditions and cultural norms of the time. She was good at entertaining and took particular pride in her ability to throw together a dinner party with almost no warning. Every day, Maddie was a little less beautiful than she had been the day before. Every moment she lived, she also was dying.
Maddie was a woman in search of an identity. She had a brain, but it had almost atrophied from lack of use, and she wanted to use it. Readers follow her struggle for identity, growth, and self-assurance for just over one year, from October 1965 through November 1966. Feelings, comments, and attitudes reflect the societal norms of the times. This is the foundation of the book, but there is more, much more to this story.
Maddie’s acquaintances saw a peculiarity. “I don’t know what it is about you and dead people, Maddie, but it’s getting out of hand. Can’t you find another way to get ahead?”
Alternate chapters set this story apart from a traditional narrative and each chapter identifies the speaker. Maddie Schwartz ties all these people together; they all fall within her sphere of influence. They interact with her; they have some connection to her. These chapters tell the story in the first person present tense, as if characters are speaking to an unseen interrogator, speaking directly to the reader, and telling their version of events. Readers get to know the participants, what they think and how they feel about themselves and others. The exceptions, of course, are the conversations of “The lady in the Lake” herself; she speaks to readers but she mostly talks to Maddie Schwartz.
Mattie exemplifies motivation for writers of mysteries, “How many larger crimes lurked in the city’s petty complaints?”
I received a copy of “Lady in the Lake” from Laura Lippman and HarperCollins Publishers. Its exceptional narrative organization and plot structure make it a favorite for readers. It captured my attention of and drew me into the story until the very unusual and surprising end.
“I’m painting a picture of myself painting a picture of myself painting a picture of myself. The picture goes on and on, the words go on and on, until they make no sense, until the picture is so tiny that you can’t see anything at all.“

Set in Baltimore, MD in the mid-1960s, Lady in the Lake is an excellent historical who-done-it. The mystery which appears routine is actually deeply buried, the people are well-drawn and the background in Baltimore is picturesque. This very volatile period in our nation's history is well presented - racial tension, the suppression of both blacks and women at home, on the job, and educationally, the day-to-day trappings of the local press, and the extreme bias of police coverage and protection. The slowly building rumbles of discontent are authentic for the time and emphasized, for me, just how far we have come, and how far we still need to go.

I found it very interesting that Laura Lippman basically re-wrote this novel to expand the part played by the press in Lady of the Lake, to honor friends lost in the mass shooting on June 28, 2018, at the Capital Gazette newsroom in Parole, MD, where 5 newspersons were killed. Newspapers are our most authentic window on the world. Television and internet news is often just flash-teasers of undocumented rumors. If you want to know what really happened, go to your newspaper's website.

Laura Lippman is an author I follow. I am happy to recommend this novel to friends and family.

I received a free electronic copy of this novel from Netgalley, Laura Lippman, and William Morrow publishers. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me. I have read this novel of my own volition, and this review reflects my honest opinion of this work.

Laura Lippman has produced a stunning, haunting novel depicting life in a changing mid-1960’s Baltimore. With a huge canvas of characters, each of whom she gives a voice, Lippman has produced a classic noir novel that chronicles the social mores of the times.

This is immersive writing; rich and flavoursome, which draws in the reader so that we experience the sights, sounds and smells of a city in a state of flux.

Madeleine Schwartz is a 37 year old housewife with one son. Living a comfortable life in a nice suburb, she realises that she is in a life she never really wanted. All her life she has followed the route expected of her; marrying a steady Jewish man, Milton, of whom her parents approve. But Maddie is restless. This is not the life she wants. She is stifled, bored and fed up entertaining the bores her husband brings home for business entertainment.

So she decides to leave and moves to an apartment in a poor area in downtown Baltimore. Her son Seth decides not to come with her and so for the first time she is free to live her own life.

Maddie is echoing the experiences of many educated women in the 1960’s; a time when women were challenging societal norms; when it was still illegal for a black man and a white woman to be a couple and assumptions would be made if those positions were reversed. Racial tensions were at the fore and desegregation still an evolving process in many US states.

It isn’t long before Maddie realises she is short of money and needing work. She finds herself an illicit lover and after stumbling over a young woman’s dead body on a search for the missing young woman, Cleo Sherwood, manages to talk her way into a lowly job helping on the Reader’s Help Desk of the Baltimore Star.

Though it’s a lowly job in the pecking order and she’s only got it as a result of accidentally finding Cleo’s body, Maddie realises she has found her environment. She’s in the place she wants to be and she is determined to make her mark and rise through the ranks to get her own byline.

Finding Cleo Sherwood’s story and her killer will be, she decides, her route to this success, even though no-one cares about ‘another black woman’ going missing.

What makes Lippman’s novel stand out is the fact that we hear from every character that Maddie meets; whether flesh and blood or ghost, we get a running internal narration from an array of characters each of whom has their own perspective on Maddie and what she is doing.

As an exploration of gender, race and class, it is a triumphant exploration of 1960’s society and how overwhelming prejudice was in those days; fought by one individual at a time.

It is clever, gripping and a love song to a changing city which speaks as if it was a character. Lady in the Lake is both a crime novel and a rich, luxurious painting of the times. The interaction between Maddie’s voice and that of Cleo shows us so clearly the prejudices that Cleo has to face and the impossibility of rising above her circumstances.

Though primarily this is Maddie’s story, it is also Cleo’s and while Maddie may find a way to break through as a symbol that women’s oppression is undergoing change, Cleo’s life faces harsher challenges.

Verdict: I loved this book and it’s startling and clear depiction of the times. Colourful, immersive, always transfixing, it is a beautifully written peon of praise to a changing city. It is also a timely reminder of a not too distant past. Lest we forget….*

*Reviewers note: Lippman could have no way of knowing that, on 27 July 2019, The Baltimore Sun would run an op-ed of which this below is an extract. I append it here in case you think that 1960’s history is a long way away…the whole can be read by clicking on the title.

Baltimore Sun Editorial Board July 27, 2019

In case anyone missed it, the president of the United States had some choice words to describe Maryland’s 7th congressional district on Saturday morning. Here are the key phrases: “no human being would want to live there,” it is a “very dangerous & filthy place,” “Worst in the USA” and, our personal favorite: It is a “rat and rodent infested mess.” He wasn’t really speaking of the 7th as a whole. He failed to mention Ellicott City, for example, or Baldwin or Monkton or Prettyboy, all of which are contained in the sprawling yet oddly-shaped district that runs from western Howard County to southern Harford County. No, Donald Trump’s wrath was directed at Baltimore and specifically at Rep. Elijah Cummings, the 68-year-old son of a former South Carolina sharecropper who has represented the district in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1996.

It’s not hard to see what’s going on here. The congressman has been a thorn in this president’s side, and Mr. Trump sees attacking African American members of Congress as good politics, as it both warms the cockles of the white supremacists who love him and causes so many of the thoughtful people who don’t to scream. President Trump bad-mouthed Baltimore in order to make a point that the border camps are “clean, efficient & well run,” which, of course, they are not — unless you are fine with all the overcrowding, squalor, cages and deprivation to be found in what the Department of Homeland Security’s own inspector-general recently called “a ticking time bomb.”

I’ve read several Laura Lippman books, in fact Sunburn, her last book was particularly enjoyable. Her female lead characters are always interesting.
In this book Lippman returns to life in a newspaper news room as seen through the eyes of Maddie Schwartz, a thirty something Jewish housewife living in Baltimore in 1966 who decides to leave her husband and teenage son behind to find herself and live an independent life.
She starts to work on a local newspaper after finding the dead body of a missing child and aspires to become a reporter.
She becomes obsessed with Cleo, the lady in the lake, a local black woman, found dead in a fountain.
Few reporters are interested in Cleo’s story as she is black and the newspaper is not really keen to run any stories about her murder.
Maddie is determined to find her killer and spends most of the book investigating, although Cleo’s voice from the dead, written in italics throughout the novel, doesn’t seem keen on Maddie or her quest!
The reader also hears from several other characters points of view, all of whom have a part in the investigation. Most of them only appear once and the author devotes several pages voicing their points of view- Wally Weiss, one time admirer of Maddie, the patrolman who responds to Maddie’s initial call, the columnist on the newspaper. Often these characters are just described by their jobs which makes the book itself sound like a newspaper article.
I found the plethora of characters rather confusing at times. I’m not sure how well this worked as a literary device and in my opinion it really slowed down the narrative.
I quite liked Maddie, she was plucky and didn’t give up easily. The position of women in the 1960s was interesting to read about as was the racial prejudice. Maddie’s affair with Ferdie, the black policeman can never be publicly acknowledged as it seems a relationship such as theirs would be illegal in 1960s Baltimore, a fact I found quite shocking.
I found Lady In The Lake slightly disappointing even though the story was good and it really could have been quite a compelling read.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for my arc in exchange for an honest review.

A well written, entertaining and page turner of a book. I could not put this one down and kept wondering how these characters intersected, so much wondering kept my up until the wee hours of the morning in order to finish it!!!

Interesting is my best description for this one. Not my favorite Laura Lippman book (I have read almost all), but still worthy. I did not find it all that suspenseful like I was hoping but I definitely wanted to see how the story resolved. I really feel the author had a good grasp of the time period and I felt I was there. The racism and sexism sadly, felt very real. I also ended up liking how the chapters were laid out, although I struggled with that at first. The story is mainly Maggie's, and most chapters are hers, followed by one with someone she just dealt with in some capacity. This is more of a "thinking" book than your typical summer fare and I urge you to try it!

Thank you to #NetGalley, Patricia MacDonald and Faber & Faber for this ARC!