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Vendor
Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik
Original language
English

WILDE LAKE

Laura Lippman

The New York Times bestselling author of the acclaimed standalones After I'm Gone, I'd Know You Anywhere, and What the Dead Know, challenges our notions of memory, loyalty, responsibility, and justice in this evocative and psychologically complex story about a long-ago death that still haunts a family.
Luisa “Lu” Brant is the newly elected—and first female—state's attorney of Howard County, Maryland, a job in which her widower father famously served. Fiercely intelligent and ambitious, she sees an opportunity to make her name by trying a mentally disturbed drifter accused of beating a woman to death in her home. It's not the kind of case that makes headlines, but peaceful Howard county doesn't see many homicides.

As Lu prepares for the trial, the case dredges up painful memories, reminding her small but tight-knit family of 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. Now, Lu wonders if the events of 1980 happened as she remembers them. What details might have been withheld from her when she was a child?

The more she learns about the case, the more questions arise. What does it mean to be a man or woman of one's times? Why do we ask our heroes of the past to conform to the present's standards? Is that fair? Is it right? Propelled into the past, she discovers that the legal system, the bedrock of her entire life, does not have all the answers. Lu realizes that even if she could learn the whole truth, she probably wouldn't want to

Since Laura Lippman's debut in 1997, she has been heralded for thoughtful, timely crime novels set in her beloved hometown of Baltimore. Now a perennial New York Times bestseller, she lives in Baltimore and New Orleans with her family.
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Published 2016-05-01 by William Morrow

Comments

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“Ultimately, Wilde Lake is not so much a crime novel that rises to the level of serious literature as serious literature that rises to the level of great crime fiction.” Read more...

"Laura Lippman's “Wilde Lake” is one of her best novels and feels like one of her most personal. (...) Lippman's novels are tough-minded, entertaining, heartfelt and wise, and they have deservedly won the Edgar award, the Anthony, the Agatha and every other crime-fiction prize. She's one of today's essential writers, and this, her 20th novel, reminds us why." Read more...

Faber & Faber

"Lippman is one of those writers whom other writers want to emulate. I love everything about her writing: her sharp yet merciful eye for human frailites, her seamlessly organic plots and, most of all, simply her writing itself. Even for a writer of Lippman's calibre, Wilde Lake is a standout novel: an intelligent, emotional, satisfying mystery that explores huge themes in small-town microcosm, in the manner of To Kill A Mocking Bird, the inspiration on which it reflects."

Marginesy

“Brainy, witty, socially conscious, and all-consuming inquiry into human nature and our slowly evolving sense of justice and equality.” Read more...

"Laura Lippman is one of my favorite writers. I cannot focus on anything else when I am reading one of her books. Her writing makes me wish I lived a sexier and more violent life."

"Richly plotted and emotionally devastating. ... Lippman plays with the concept of truth and expertly hones in on the question of whether there are some truths we never want to know." (starred and boxed PW review) Read more...

“Lippman as always treads the fine line between certainty and amazement.”

“Suspenseful and finely written.”