I wanted to read Laura Lippman’s Lady In the Lake after I heard an NPR interview with the author. Lippman was knowledgeable and personable about her city’s fractured history, the state of American politics and journalism, its ills and its profound necessity for examining the state of the nation and ensuring free, open democracy. Certainly, her standalone novel contains threads of these ideas. It is, however, unlike Lippman’s expansive personality and openness, a cramped book. The premise held promise: a recently separated late-thirties beauty, Madeline “Maddie” Schwartz (née Morgenstern) has left marriage and middle-class comfort behind to pursue a reporter’s beat. In 1966, there was a ceiling still so thick for women that not even Maddie’s sledgehammer beauty and persistence can break it. Living in one of Baltimore’s seedier neighbourhoods, Maddie pursues an affair with a black policeman, whose nightly visits, an inter-racial “romance” still illicit and dangerous to both, are vigorous and all-consuming. Maddie revels in her freedom for sex and solitude. There’s a mild regret at leaving her son Seth with his father. Seth proves a snivelling, whiny character and I never warmed to him. If at first Maddie’s pursuit of a journalistic career seems random and half-hearted, once she gets a clerical job at a local paper, she begins a relentless pursuit to find the killer of the “lady in the lake”, Cleo Sherwood, make her mark, and get a beat of her own.
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Tag: Mystery Novel
REVIEW: Arnaldur Indridason’s REYKJAVIK NIGHTS, Darkness In Light
Miss Bates read Arnaldur Indridason’s Reykjavik Nights as a rom palate-cleanser. (Eons ago, when her genre reading was crimefic, she read Indridason’s Jar City and Silence Of the Grave. They’re fabulous books; Miss Bates highly recommends them.) To return to Indridason’s latest Erlendur mystery, Miss Bates was surprised to find how poignant it was and even more surprised to find herself identifying with the detecting character.
Reykjavik Nights is Indridason’s tenth Erlendur mystery; it serves as a prequel to the previous nine. In it, Indridason explores what made Erlendur the man we met as a seasoned detective in earlier books. Indridason brings Erlendur full circle in this latest, having resolved the childhood incident that plagues him in Strange Shores. Reykjavik Nights introduces it. Miss Bates read Reykjavik Nights in two keys: in the major, as a detective’s bildungsroman; and, in the minor, as a study of one of crime fiction’s great introverts. An introvert herself, Miss Bates saw in the youthful Erlendur the signs pointing to a life-long hermetic existence outside the monastic. Like most introverts, Erlendur possesses a tenacious work ethic, tends to melancholy, and reads voraciously. Continue reading
REVIEW/RESPONSE and Miss Bates Reads A Mystery Novel: Laurie R. King’s DREAMING SPIES and Elliptical Romance
Miss Bates rarely ventures outside her romance reading enclave, but when she hears the siren call of another genre, it’s a crime novel she goes to. Laurie R. King’s The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, named one of the twentieth century’s 100 best mysteries by IMBA, has been in Miss B’s TBR pile forever. Dreaming Spies, with its detecting team of Sherlock Holmes and wife, Mary Russell, is 13th in the series. (Rats … now Miss B. has to go back to twelve more!) Amidst, like her friend Vassiliki, a super-busy near-non-reading few weeks, Miss B. managed to get through Dreaming Spies in dribs and drabs. But she must read, even when deadlines loom. As a result of this sporadic reading, often conducted in bed nodding over a gently glowing Kindle, Dreaming Spies‘ mystery receded into inchoate Miss B. head-mess (not to fault King, but Miss B’s weak focus and exhaustion) and what emerged into the foreground was Mary Russell’s first-person perspective, a wonderful use of first-person “voice,” and the things “not said” about her marriage to Holmes. Though Miss Bates doesn’t often indulge in blurb quoting, her hazy retention of plot details, in this case, necessitates it. Continue reading
Miss Bates Reads Romance 