Lady in the Lake

Laura Lippman is a master at creating compelling but not quite likable protagonists and using shifting timelines and POV. Lady in the Lake utilizes these methods, but isn't quite as satisfying as her other novels. One night in 1968, Madeline Schwartz's husband invites a new tennis buddy to dinner - a local TV anchor with whom Madeline had one date in high school. That night inspires Maddy to leave her comfortable life and follow her teenage dream of becoming a reporter. Well, a housewife in her late 30s with no experience or degree isn't going to get a reporting job but she does manage to get hired as a columnist's assistant. From there, she branches out into investigating the murders of a local tween and of a woman whose body was found in a lake a few months earlier. 

On the surface, it's a standard historical mystery but Lippman focuses more on the characters than the mystery which makes for a interesting but somewhat disjointed novel wrapped around an unsatisfying mystery. After every chapter narrated by Maddy we get a chapter narrated by someone with whom she interacted - the columnist, the only woman on the paper's reporting staff, the African American cop with whom she's begun an affair, the woman who would become Tess Monaghan's mother, the murdered woman's young son - and occasional chapters from the dead woman's ghost. While interesting, it never quite flowed. I enjoyed it, but it wasn't quite up to Lippman's standards.