Wilde Lake by Laura Lippman
As usual, there was a fair internal fight about what should be this month’s Book of the Month (as I’m not allowed to take up eight pages with my extended thoughts on each title), but something about the fallible intimacy of Wilde Lake had me drawn irresistibly to it, to this slice of life, so familiar and all-American – like baseball and freshman parties – yet so foreign.
In Columbia, Maryland, two years after the planned community was built in 1967, Andrew Jackson Brant brings his family to their new house – or an old one, transported to this new place beside a man-made lake. And he builds a legacy: a State’s Attorney raising two children without the wife that died shortly after the birth of their daughter, Luisa. And it is Lu who narrates the story, as both a seven-year-old and as a grown woman, widowed and with two young children of her own, and now the first woman appointed to the same job her father once had.
Lu is dynamite, fiercely clever, engaged with the town she lives in, and absolutely never giving in to anyone. Except for two people: her cherished father and beloved brother, AJ. It is her blind spot to these men that drives the story, as she begins her new job, eager to prove herself, and takes on a murder case that seems simple enough. A woman is beaten to death in her apartment, and the suspect, whose DNA is everywhere, seen by a neighbour lurking around the complex. But the case becomes immediately fraught when the accused killer calls on Lu’s previous boss – the man she ran for Attorney against – as his defendant, and everything in Lu’s life starts to get personal in more ways than one.
Lippman has a fine, delicate hand for a story that runs deep and long into a town’s history and a young girl’s memory, making the book a divine, red-wine pleasure to read. Lu’s arrogance as an adult and painful naivety as a youth deliver a solid, real character, one who doesn’t always want to see the truth but will fight tooth and nail for it. An understated homage to To Kill a Mockingbird, and the successor that shed unfavourable light on its characters, this story of old habits in a new city is a deep lake to lose yourself in.