We don’t spend all of our time following Maddie around as she makes serious mistakes with her questions.

Still, she keeps making opportunities for herself by investigating the death of the woman in the fountain, a death that no one seems particularly interested in because the victim is African American. Until a body is found in one of the city’s fountains-and even after-Maddie is marginalized. This leads her to a trial position at The Star. After Maddie and an acquaintance find the body of Tessie Fine, Maddie takes it upon herself to write to her accused murderer. The second, the surprising murder of a young Jewish girl is the catalyst that helps Maddie find her new path in life as a journalist.

First, the one hinted at by the ghostly interstitial interruptions of Cleo Sherwood, becomes the main plot of the book. Two disappearances turn Lady in the Lake into a mystery. She finds an apartment in a not-great area of the city before she meets a very amorous African American police officer who not only helps her get set up as a single woman, but becomes her lover and connection to the Baltimore police department. Maddie doesn’t know exactly what she’s going to do, at first. She has had enough of her unfulfilling life in the suburbs and separates from her husband. Everyone seems satisfied…except for Maddie. Maddie Schwartz has been married to her husband for almost twenty years, living the ideal life of an upper middle class Jewish woman. This novel’s constant defiance of expectation makes it stand head and shoulders above the crowd of amateur detective mysteries.īaltimore in 1966 offers few opportunities for a woman to reinvent herself. Laura Lippman’s Lady in the Lake features an amateur detective who, for once, bungles and slips up and makes terrible mistakes.

Either that or they’re graced with extraordinary good luck when it comes to getting information or stumbling onto clues. What annoys me about a lot of them is that these amateurs are often too good at their adopted profession. They’re a great vehicle for cozy mysteries, or for mysteries where the police aren’t interested for whatever reason. Mystery fiction is full of amateur detectives.

Lady in the lake book by laura lippman