Review by New York Times 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."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 5, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Wilde Lake does not live up to its name (it's man-made), and the planned community that surrounds it fails in its bucolic mission when violence erupts at a high-school graduation party in 1980. Accused of raping a white girl, an African American student is attacked and left paralyzed. Chased by AJ (who ends up with a broken arm), the son of the much-admired, long-widowed state's attorney, one of the assailants dies after falling on his own knife. Our narrator is AJ's much younger sister, precocious, solitary Lu. As more details click into place, it becomes clear that Lippman's latest ensnaring mystery (following Hush Hush, 2015) is a cunning variation on To Kill a Mockingbird. In the present, Lu is a young widow who has just followed her father's footsteps to become the county's first woman state's attorney. An accomplishment quickly undermined as the first murder she investigates leads her inexorably back not only to that fateful summer night, but also to the case that made her father famous, an event rife with brutal implications about class, race, and gender. As shocking secrets are revealed, the reader realizes that nothing and no one can be taken at face value in Lippman's brainy, witty, socially conscious, and all-consuming inquiry into human nature and our slowly evolving sense of justice and equality. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Lippman is an A-list crime writer, and her reimagining of Harper Lee's classic will be of added interest in the wake of the release of Lee's Go Set a Watchman and Lee's recent death.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Luisa "Lu" Brant, the heroine of this richly plotted and emotionally devastating standalone from Lippman (Hush, Hush), has been newly elected as state's attorney of Maryland's Howard County. She's back in her hometown of Columbia, where she and her brother, AJ, eight years her senior, were raised by their widowed father, Andrew Jackson Brant, a formidable prosecutor with an Atticus Finch sense of justice and morality. Widowed herself and raising eight-year-old twins, Lu lives in the house where she grew up replete with memories of a mostly friendless childhood spent tagging after AJ or reading. Everything in the Brants' lives is cleaved into before and after a shocking act of violence on the night of AJ's high school graduation in 1980. When Lu takes on her first murder case as state's attorney-a woman is found beaten and strangled in her apartment-she has no idea that the defendant, a mentally unstable drifter, could be connected to a larger pattern of darkness stretching back to her childhood. Lippman plays with the concept of truth and expertly homes in on the question of whether there are some truths we never want to know. Agent: Vicky Bijur, Vicky Bijur Literary. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The parallels to Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird are interesting, but this novel of an upstanding Baltimore family with skeletons in every closet works perfectly well without them. Told in alternating first- and third-person chapters that criss-cross through past and present, it's the story of Luisa Brant, the first woman to be elected state's attorney of Howard County, MD. Lu is following in her widowed father's footsteps; Andrew Jackson Brant held the same position for years and was well regarded by the community. But Lu's first murder case causes her to question the stories and myths her father and older brother AJ have told her for so many years and to reexamine her own impressions of a summer when AJ and a friend were involved in an incident that led to the death of one youth and the crippling of another. Verdict This is Lippman's best stand-alone since And When She Was Bad, although readers won't go wrong reading any of her works. Recommended for her many fans, as well as readers who appreciate gothic-tinged family dramas, multifaceted characters, and the author's perfectly written Baltimore-area settings. [See Prepub Alert, 11/16/15.]-Liz French, Library Journal © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by School Library Journal Review
At 17, Lu's older brother AJ was involved in the death of another teen. Though AJ walked away with a broken arm while the other boy was killed with his own knife, the event was ruled an accident. Lu idolizes her older brother almost as much as she looks up to her father, Andrew Jackson Brent Sr., a state's attorney and a pillar of society in their newly minted utopian society of the late 1960s. Now Lu, aka Luisa, a state's attorney herself, is the widowed mother of twins and lives with her aging dad. There is a new murder, and as Lu tries this case, connections to her father's biggest murder case, links to her brother's tragic events, and all of Lu's most vivid memories slowly unfold. The story is told in a series of flashbacks that are deftly handled by the author, and readers will assume that there must be a connection among all these deaths. The suspense of not knowing just what's going on, the smooth writing, and the slight cliff-hanger effect of the alternating chapters will keep readers up late. This is much more than a mystery or thriller; the crimes are almost a mere backdrop to the personal stories of Lu and her family members. The honest portrayals of teenage AJ and his much younger sister growing up will have wide YA appeal. VERDICT First purchase for all high school libraries, and a great read-alike for fans of To Kill a Mockingbird.-Jake Pettit, Enka Schools, Istanbul, Turkey © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Lippman (Hush Hush, 2015, etc.) takes familiar themes to a new locale as she traces a family's journey from raucous Baltimore to the meticulously planned community of Columbia, Maryland. Growing up in green, slightly hippie suburbia has its pluses and minuses for Luisa Brant. She lives in an old stone tavern her father, Andrew Jackson Brant, state's attorney for Howard County, had moved onto a lush double lot for his wife. Adele Brant lived in her dream house for less than a year before she died a week after Luisa's birth. Although she's never quite accepted by her peers, motherless Lu does get to tag along with her brother, AJ, and his multicultural band of friends from Wilde Lake High. AJ leads a charmed life of academic ability, athletic triumph, and artistic talent, and some of these blessings seem to rub off on Luisa. What's hers alone is her raw ambition. Her drive powers her through life's challenges: the death of her young husband, Gabe, the difficulty of raising her twins without him, and her complicated relationship with her father, which grows even thornier after she moves back into her childhood home. It also brings her to what for many would be the pinnacle of her career when she beats her old boss Frederick C. Hollister III and takes her father's old position, becoming the first woman elected state's attorney for Howard County. Her new job pits her almost immediately against Fred in a case that looks like a sure winner. Homeless Rudy Drysdale is accused of breaking into Mary McNally's apartment and killing her. There's forensic evidence, there's an eyewitness, but for Lippman, there's no such thing as a sure thing. Before long, Lu the fierce looks like she may have caught a tiger by the tail. Although she overamps some reveals and shortchanges others, Lippman as always treads the fine line between certainty and amazement. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
