By Laura Lippman
This book is about want. We all do it. I want what she has. I want his life. I want better, more, other, everything. Want can drive people to perform evil with dreary repetition.
Maddie Schwartz has the life she always wanted: wealthy, devoted husband, dutiful son, large house for entertaining – she’s got it all! Until a fateful dinner with a former high school classmate reminds her what her early goals were. She discovers she is actually living her mother’s dream rather than her own, and it is making her miserable.
Therefore, like most obstacles in her life, Maddie calmly and methodically decides to start over. She separates from her former life with practicality and ease to begin chasing newspaper leads and the vision of herself as a writer. Aided by sheer dumb luck, she stumbles upon two different murder victims, becoming a part of the investigations intrinsically.
Trying to solve the murders by following the clues, Maddie is determined to get the scoop, thereby establishing her career in the male-dominated world in which she is trying to gain access. The police suspect her, except the one that she is sleeping with, who happens to be black, in Baltimore, in the 60’s. Those who follow history know that this particular situation is fraught with drama and risk. But Maddie knows how to read people, especially men, to get her to her goals. She also seems to have the knack of being able to ask just the right question to get people to reveal the one thing they were trying to protect.
Even those answers are not what was expected. Are the suspects truly the murderers portrayed? What of the victims? Perhaps they are also not as taken advantage of as they seem. The danger is closer than Maddie imagines, and the consequences of a misstep could be dire. Told from the viewpoints of multiple characters, including the Lady in the Lake herself, the reader also enjoys a new take on the whodunnit genre.
Soundtrack
- Very Sarah McLachlan
- Building a Mystery
- Possession
- Sweet Surrender
- Angel
- Ice Cream
Pros & Cons & Potential Spoilers
Pros
- Didn’t guess this twist
- There were multiple twists
- Proud of Maddie being an iconoclast – but wish she would have went all the way
Cons
- Maddie let me down towards the end
- Most of the female characters are hard, mean, and/or stereotypical outside of Maddie
- I wanted most of the plot lines to go a bit farther, but they felt like they drifted away