LADY IN THE LAKE by Laura Lippman

Maddie Schwartz is ready to leave her husband in 1966.  To her surprise, her teenage son elects to live with his dad.  Maddie charges on, though, and strikes out on her own.  When she and a friend find the body of a girl who disappeared, Maddie finagles her way into a clerical job in a newspaper office.  Then another body is discovered.  This time it’s a young black woman named Cleo, discovered near the fountain in a lake after the body interferes with the lighting system.  Maddie gets caught up in this murder as well, as she is the one who reports the electrical issue, as a result of a letter to the newspaper.  Cleo’s life parallels Maddie’s in many ways, but Maddie is very much alive—more so than ever actually.  She pulls a stunt early in the novel that did not endear her to me, but her fearlessness, ambition, and ineptitude in interviewing family members and possible perpetrators related to the two murders definitely got my attention.  I sincerely wanted her to succeed, but she takes no prisoners along the way.  Her flaws, though, are what make her such a compelling character.  I would be remiss, however, if I did not mention the format of this book.  Several first-person (italicized) chapters are narrated by the murder victims.   The voices of a number of other chapters, also in first-person, belong to characters just introduced in the previous chapter, and sometimes these characters are very tangential.  Whether this chain of narrators has some purpose or whether it is just a gimmick, I’m not sure, but the author manages to keep the storyline on track.  Sometimes I found the diversion welcome and sometimes not.  Most of the chapters, however, are third-person and follow Maddie’s unwavering efforts to build an independent and fulfilling life for herself.  Although she does not intentionally trample people close to her, sometimes there’s collateral damage.