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Summary
Summary
An African-American man accused of rape by a humiliated girl. A vengeful father. A courageous attorney. A worshipful daughter. Think you know this story? Think again.
Laura Lippman, the extravagantly gifted ( Chicago Tribune ) New York Times bestselling author, delivers one of her best novels ( Washington Post) a modern twist on To Kill a Mockingbird .Scott Turow writes in the New York Times, Wilde Lake is a real success.
Luisa Lu Brant is the newly elected state s attorney representing suburban Maryland including the famous planned community of Columbia, created to be a utopia of racial and economic equality. Prosecuting a controversial case involving a disturbed drifter accused of beating a woman to death, the fiercely ambitious Lu is determined to avoid the traps that have destroyed other competitive, successful women. She s going to play it smart to win this case and win big cementing her political future.
But her intensive preparation for trial unexpectedly dredges up painful recollections of another crime the night when her brother, AJ, saved his best friend at the cost of another man s life. Only eighteen, AJ was cleared by a grand jury. Justice was done. Or was it? Did the events of 1980 happen as she remembers them? She was only a child then. What details didn t she know?
As she plunges deeper into the past, Lu is forced to face a troubling reality. The legal system, the bedrock of her entire life, does not have all the answers. But what happens when she realizes that, for the first time, she doesn t want to know the whole truth?
"Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Lippman's new standalone, set in the affluent Baltimore suburb of Columbia, is a solidly plotted mystery novel wrapped in a devastating study of a family's fall from grace. When the book's heroine, local prosecutor Luisa "Lu" Brant, begins an investigation into the events leading to the suicide of accused murderer Rudy Drysdale, she opens a door to crimes and tragedies of the past, including a rape, an attempted murder, and a fatal stabbing. Lu only half-remembers these acts of violence from her childhood, and had assumed they all touched the Brandt family because her father, Andrew, was then Columbia's highly respected prosecutor, and her brother, AJ, eight years her senior, was a popular, multitalented teen who knew everyone involved in the crimes. But the deeper she probes into Drysdale's suicide, the more she realizes that the Brants are being held together by secrets kept from her. Lippman alternates between Lu's first-person memories of the way things were and an objective, present-tense account of how things are. The use of two readers easily signals the chronological shifts. Reader McInerney begins with a voice filled with a youthful exuberance that gradually matures and grows more thoughtful as the memories draw closer to the present. Poole's smooth, sophisticated observation of Lu feeling her way through her new job as state's attorney has a nice subtle edge, indicating the character's anxiety and vague feeling of disappointment, both of which increase as her family's past comes into sharper focus. A Morrow hardcover. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
Out of Bounds by Val McDermid; Wilde Lake by Laura Lippman; Blood Wedding by Pierre Lemaitre; Black Night Falling by Rod Reynolds; Blackwater by James Henry Val McDermid's 30th novel, Out of Bounds (Little, Brown, [pound]18.99), is the fourth to feature DCI Karen Pirie, head of Police Scotland's historic cases unit. When a teenage joyrider ends up in a coma, a routine DNA test reveals a close familial match to the perpetrator of an unsolved murder that took place in 1996. Discovering the killer's identity should be a fairly easy task, but, the boy being adopted, Pirie and her sidekick, the doltish but earnest DC Jason Murray, find themselves in a maze of red tape. Pirie, who is struggling to come to terms with the death of her partner, also becomes involved unofficially in the case of Gabriel Abbott, a lonely obsessive who has been found shot dead. DI Alan Noble, in charge of the case, believes it's suicide, but Pirie thinks there might be a link with the death of Abbott's mother, 22 years earlier, in a presumed terrorist attack. McDermid's expertly juggled plotlines and masterful handling of pace and tension tick all the best boxes, but what makes this book a real cracker is Pirie herself -- grieving, insubordinate and dogged in her pursuit of the various culprits. Inspired by To Kill a Mockingbird, Laura Lippman's Wilde Lake (Faber & Faber, [pound]12.99) is set in Maryland, where Luisa "Lu" Brant, newly elected as the first female state's attorney of Howard County, decides to prove herself by prosecuting a drifter accused of beating a woman to death. Intelligent and competitive, Lu comes from a family of achievers who enjoy status and privilege. Her father was a legendary state's attorney for the same county. AJ, her older brother, was a high school hero who saved the life of his friend Davey, the only black kid in their circle, when he was attacked by two brothers who believed he'd raped their sister. Two narratives, both from Lu's point of view, interweave past and present until she finds herself confronted with some unpalatable truths about her relatives. Subtle, moving and intriguing, this excellent book is a complex study of how, as Lu puts it, "we always want our heroes to be better than their times, to hold the enlightened views we have achieved one hundred, fifty, ten years later". Blood Wedding (MacLehose, [pound]12.99) by French author Pierre Lemaitre, translated by Frank Wynne, is the story of nanny Sophie Duguet, who is plagued by nightmares and memory loss. She becomes the subject of a nationwide manhunt after apparently strangling her charge, six-year-old Leo, with a shoelace. There's also the matter of her mother-in-law, who she may have shoved fatally down a staircase, and the mysterious death of her husband, Vincent. On the run and desperate for a new identity, Sophie decides to marry a soldier in the hope that he will be posted abroad, taking her with him -- at which point a second narrator, Frantz, takes up the baton, and it becomes clear that Sophie is not, after all, her own worst enemy. Utterly unpredictable and told with relish, Blood Wedding is a dementedly Hitchcock ian tale of gas-lighting: suspend disbelief and enjoy. Although Rod Reynolds set the bar extraordinarily high for himself with his debut novel, The Dark Inside, it's fair to say that his second book more than lives up to the promise of its predecessor. Black Night Falling (Faber, [pound]12.99) picks up with reporter Charlie Yates in October 1946, six months after his adventure in Texarkana. Yates, newly married and kicking his heels on a small newspaper in California, is asked by an acquaintance to help look into the mysterious deaths of three women in Hot Springs, Arkansas. On arrival, he discovers that his contact has perished in a hotel fire and that nobody in the place -- a sleazy hotbed of gambling, prostitution and corruption -- seems to know anything about the murders. Determined to do the right thing, Yates begins to investigate and soon comes up against some formidable adversaries. Smart plotting, immaculate research, a tersely precise style and a protagonist with a touch of the knight-errant about him add up to pitch-perfect American noir. Blackwater (Quercus, [pound]12.99) is the first in an Essex-based police-procedural series by James Henry, author of the prequels to RD Wingfield's DI Jack Frost books. The year is 1983 -- before the reforms of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act -- and things at Colchester CID are less "procedural" and more laissez-faire than they would be nowadays. DI Nick Lowry and his colleagues grapple with cases including an armed robbery at a post office, a massive shipment of drugs, a headless corpse and a fatal encounter between the local hard boys and the squaddies from the nearby garrison. An impressively complex plot, wonderfully atmospheric descriptions of the bleak estuary landscape, an engaging protagonist and some tasty villains get this series off to a flying start. - Laura Wilson.
New York Review of Books Review
FORMER REPORTERS HAVE often become renowned novelists - think of Ernest Hemingway or Stephen Crane. Today, as the economic horizons dwindle for journalists, the tendency to change fields is probably stronger, with fine writers migrating from journalism to fiction across a spectrum of genres. Among my personal favorites are Tom Wolfe, Pete Dexter, John Sandford, Jack Fuller, Carl Hiaasen and Anna Quindlen. It might feed the paranoia of some contemporary politicians to note how often professional reporters, supposedly skilled in exhaustive fact-gathering and dispassionate narrative, have proved to be good at making things up. Nonetheless, it's easy to recognize the tools in the journalist's kit that also work well in a novelist's hands: an economic but energetic prose style; solid intuition about the motives of the characters; an appreciation for detail; a good sense of how individuals connect in a society. I catalog these skills because they're pivotal to the success of "Wilde Lake," by Laura Lippman, who was a reporter for 20 years before turning her hand to crime fiction. The story in "Wilde Lake" focuses principally on Luisa (Lu) Brant, the daughter of the former state's attorney (the local prosecutor) in Columbia, Md. Following the death of her husband at age 39, Lu has returned to Columbia, moving in with her father in the house where she was raised. Teensy, the housekeeper who helped bring her up, now looks after her twins, Penelope and Justin, allowing Lu to run successfully for her father's old job as prosecutor. The novel meanders amiably between two time lines. One is Lu's first-person recollection of her childhood in the village of Wilde Lake. (Columbia, she explains, is "a 'town' comprising four villages, with each village defined by a set number of neighborhoods.") Growing up motherless, Lu was fascinated by her brother, AJ, eight years older, a high school Mr. Everything who was a theater star and a Yalie in the making - in short, a hero. On the night of his high school graduation, AJ chased down the local toughs who'd stabbed the only black kid in AJ's circle, an event that ended with one attacker dead on the point of his own knife. "People say it's hard to be good," Lu remarks. "It's harder still to be famous for being good, to find that balance between sincerity and sanctimony. But I believe AJ managed to do it." Accompanying this reminiscence is a contemporary story told in the third-person present tense from Lu's point of view. (I don't understand why Lippman eschewed a single narrative voice, but she handles both adroitly, and the back and forth isn't annoying.) Once elected as the new prosecutor, she decides to prove herself by taking on the investigation and trial of the first homicide that occurs under her watch, the murder of the waitress Mary McNally, a middle-aged single woman found strangled in her apartment. The fingerprints of Rudy Drysdale, a slightly deranged local misfit, turn up in revealing locations at the crime scene, and he is charged with the murder. Rudy is an odd doppelgänger of AJ, another lifelong resident of the area, almost the same age, but forever lost. As Lu sinks into the Drysdale case, she often recalls her father's most celebrated murder prosecution, a case he won even though all that was left of the missing decedent was one platform shoe found inexplicably in the defendant's car. There are two central figures in this novel. The first, of course, is Lu, who, we realize long before she does, has come home to delve into a simmering personal discontent that leaves her, like her father, remote in virtually all her relationships, including an affair she's conducting with one of her brother's former high school pals, a married man who always sends Lu home with visible bruises and goes - no kidding - by the name Bash. The other star is Columbia itself. Lippman attended Wilde Lake High School, and her descriptions of Columbia display her reportorial skills to full advantage as she layers in the town's unique history and sociology, making them essential to the story rather than digressions. The developer Jim Rouse, she explains, "decided in the 1960s that he wanted to build a 'new town' utopia in Maryland farmland midway between Baltimore and Washington, D.C." Rouse intended Columbia, unlike other American suburbs, to be a place where residents wouldn't be separated on the basis of class, race and faith. But the dream was in danger from the start. Rouse acquired the land "stealthily, parcel by parcel, keeping prices low," which meant that "the egalitarian experiment ... began in deceit." All the characters in "Wilde Lake" are beset by a shadow consciousness, the guilty legacy of coming of age in a place intended to be paradise that manifestly was not. Class antagonisms in particular remain untamed. AJ, who fled a highpaying job at Lehman Brothers before the Great Recession, has grown even richer as an author and speaker about "simple living" and "urban gardening." He and his second wife reside in "a pretty scruffy neighborhood" in southwest Baltimore. "AJ is often photographed outside their home, a simple redbrick rowhouse. Photographers and reporters are never allowed inside, however," because "AJ and Lauranne actually own three rowhouses, reconfigured ... so that there is an open courtyard with a pool." "Wilde Lake" is engrossing, suspenseful and substantial, its wit easing a sober, somewhat elegiac air. Lu is surrounded by loss, not only of the utopian dream but of so many people in her life: her mother, her husband, her brother's best friend (dead of AIDS). And then there's the lingering shadow of the three homicides - the killing on AJ's graduation night, her father's prosecution and the Drysdale case - that tie together past and present. And yet. To me, the pithiest book about writing is E. M. Forster's "Aspects of the Novel," in which he chose to reveal some of the trade's darkest secrets. "Nearly all novels are feeble at the end," he observed. "This is because the plot requires to be wound up,... and usually the characters go dead." My own interpretation is that all novels are hobbled at their end by a fundamental problem of verisimilitude: Life goes on, but a novel does not. We treasure narrative because it makes meaning from our experience, but there is inevitably something artificial in imposing the conclusion that accomplishes that goal. In mysteries, this bedrock conundrum is even more troublesome. The genre is powered by the inexplicable - something has happened with no obvious explanation. At the close of the book, the unexplained must be fully accounted for, which is a way of saying that in their endings, mysteries must cannibalize the source of their vitality. As a result, the explication of events usually rushes out in a series of breathless revelations. Yet there are still better and worse endings to mysteries, and the conclusion of "Wilde Lake" is not its high point. Lippman artfully exploits the expectations of mystery readers to augment her plot's surprises. But too much has been hidden without good reason, both by the characters and by the author. Figures from the past, minor in the present, roar into control of the story. We just don't know enough about them for these developments to have as full an emotional resonance as Lippman would like. But a corollary of Forster's observation about endings is that the windup isn't the primary attraction of good fiction. Rather, it's the pleasure of entering a coherent imagined world, a world with enigmas much like those we know. And by that measure, "Wilde Lake" is a real success. It may feed the paranoia of some politicians to note how good journalists are at making things up. SCOTT TUROW'S most recent novel is "Identical."