Mystery of the ‘Lady in the Lake’
“Lady in the Lake,” Laura Lippman’s latest novel, is set in Baltimore in 1966. Her protagonist is Maddie Schwartz, a housewife who has been married for almost 20 years. Her husband is a reliable breadwinner, the father of their teen-aged son, but frankly he’s boring.
Maddie and her husband went to high school together. He hadn’t been the guy she really wanted to be with, but he seemed like a safe choice and when he asked her to marry him, she agreed to do it. As the book opens, her husband, Milton, has informed her that he has invited one of their former classmates over for dinner.
Milton didn’t realize that Maddie had had a mad crush on their dinner guest when they were all in high school together. Now their guest is a hotshot local TV personality and his appearance on the scene serves as a triggering event for Maddie to decide soon thereafter to leave her husband.
She pursues her desires, finally living an exciting life. Her husband makes things difficult. After she leaves their house and moves into a cheap apartment in a bad neighborhood he doesn’t give her enough money to get by and he’s stalling her on finalizing their divorce.
Maddie is forced to live by her wits. Fortunately she is shrewd and physically attractive. She finds work and before you can say “single again” she meets a man and becomes his secret lover. It’s complicated, Maddie is white and still legally married. He is a Baltimore cop and he’s black.
Under cover of night he usually arrives in a patrol car and sneaks into her place through a window. He warns her, she should not be leaving her window unlocked in that neighborhood. She keeps doing it. He keeps dropping by for his clandestine midnight visits. He’s always gone by sunrise.
Maddie has found passion, but she still lacks purpose. Then she finds it. The police are searching for a little girl who has vanished and Maddie decides to conduct her own personal search for her. When she manages to accomplish a feat that the police could not, locating the girl’s body, she finds herself slowly rising toward a purposeful new career path: journalism.
A woman’s body is discovered in the fountain at a nearby lake — Maddie the newspaper reporter is intrigued. Who was she? The dead woman was young and black and apparently isn’t a high priority for the police or for her editors. But Maddie is undeterred. She plunges into solving the mystery of how that woman died and who is responsible.
The author employs a nifty device; we keep hearing the voice of the murdered woman imploring Maddie to leave the case alone, to let her rest in peace. By the time you get to the end of the story, you will be impressed by the twists that Lippman uses to flip our suspicions end over end.
You can hear my interview with Laura Lippman on Sunday at 10:30 a.m. on WYSO (91.3FM).
This summer, two area writers won national awards for their self-published works.
Traci Ison Schafer (traciisonschafer.com) won the Silver Medal in Sci-Fi/ Fantasy/Horror E-book category for her science fiction Young Adult novel, “The Anuan Legacy,” from the Independent Publisher Book Awards. Schafer is a native Ohioan, lived and worked for many years in Dayton, and recently moved to Oklahoma for her career and family.
Linda A. Marshall (lindaamarshall.com) won the Silver Medal for a Personal Relationship Memoir for her memoir, “A Long Awakening To Grace: A Memoir of Loss and Discovery,” from the Human Relations Indie Book Awards.
Marshall, who lives in the Dayton area, has been a teacher, an ordained United Church of Christ minister, and a counselor.
Recently, I reached out to both writers to find out more about their books and their writing journeys.
Linda A. Marshall
What was the inspiration for “A Long Awakening to Grace”?
Marshall: It was a calling. A nurse, upon hearing a small piece of our family’s story, told me three times, “You need to write a book about this.”
Good friends who knew and appreciated the significance of our story encouraged me to write it. When I looked up after reading a small piece of the story to a writer’s group, tears were streaming from
My focus now is on writing my blog, “Heart Ponderings.” As a contemplative writer, I enjoy the journey of writing for the discovery of inner wisdom.
Traci Ison Schafer
What was the inspiration for “The Anuan Legacy?”
Schafer: For a number of years, I worked at Wright-Patterson Air