“And Maddie, whose instincts for what men need were unerring, knew immediately how to make it right.” “She had offended him,” Maddie realizes of the columnist she blithely lobbies for a job offer. Maddie arrives at the Star’s offices with a scoop, a letter from the chief suspect in Tessie Fine’s murder, and tries to convince them to hire her. Her tenure there is part of how Lippman unpacks what it meant to be a woman in a man’s world circa 1966. Still, it did not escape my attention that her disappearance was noted almost immediately.”īy the time Cleo’s story surfaces outside the black community, Maddie has wheedled her way into an entry-level position at the Star newspaper. “Tessie Fine – she was missed right away. “March came in like a lion, they still hadn’t found me, and the daily newspapers still hadn’t written a word about me,” Cleo says in beyond-the-grave narration that regularly punctuates the novel. Eventually, she’s equally intrigued by Cleo’s disappearance months earlier, one ignored by the mainstream press.
When a young Jewish girl from her community disappears and Maddie finds the body during a volunteer search of a city park two days later, she’s hooked on finding out what happened. She leaves her safe suburban existence and strikes out on her own, securing an apartment and a lover in quick order. She’s the “Lady in the Lake” at the center of Laura Lippman’s new crime novel, which investigates both Cleo’s fate and the shifting social mores of the ‘60s.Īs the book opens, Maddie yearns for more. Maddie is a married Jewish mother to a teen-age son and a housewife in 1960s Baltimore, with a freezer full of her famous dinner rolls and “effortless–effortless- seeming–organization.”Ĭleo is a black single mother of two young boys, the mistress of a Baltimore dry-cleaner owner, and political wannabe. Maddie Schwartz and Cleo Sherwood live dramatically different lives.
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