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A review by readingwithhippos
Lady in the Lake by Laura Lippman
4.0
Maddie Schwartz, a Baltimore housewife in the ‘60s, decides one day she wants more out of life than what she got. So she leaves her husband and teenage son and gets herself an apartment in a questionable neighborhood and sets out to find herself. When she unwittingly discovers a body in a park, she decides journalism is the career for her and starts pursuing a byline with dogged efficiency. What she doesn’t understand is that insinuating herself into a crime isn’t the best way to solve it, and some murder victims don’t want to be avenged.
Female characters in mysteries so rarely get to be complicated, fully fleshed-out people, and even less often do they get to be unlikeable (unless they’re the villain, of course). That’s why I enjoyed Maddie as a character even as I raised my eyebrows repeatedly at her decisions. I also loved how the book was structured, with short vignettes from various characters interspersed between Maddie’s chapters.
Female characters in mysteries so rarely get to be complicated, fully fleshed-out people, and even less often do they get to be unlikeable (unless they’re the villain, of course). That’s why I enjoyed Maddie as a character even as I raised my eyebrows repeatedly at her decisions. I also loved how the book was structured, with short vignettes from various characters interspersed between Maddie’s chapters.