I really like Lippman's writing. I did not like most of the characters. Further, it seems like she copied some of them from "To Kill a Mockingbird." Except, I liked them in TKAM. Almost everything in the story seemed to be a lie. I am very familiar with the setting of the story and the author did a fair job in describing the area.The bottom line is that I am rounded my 3.5 rating to a 4.

Laura Lippman has been described as one of the best crime novelists writing today – and I have to say from a purely readers point of view that I would absolutely agree with that.Wilde Lake is perhaps my favourite of hers so far – multi layered, intensely engaging, a story about family secrets, community, perception and reality, with some intriguing and brilliantly drawn characters and an atmospheric and authentic setting.The story uses the past/present narrative in a slightly different way, as L...

Most readers seemed to like this book. I thought there were some good moments but not enough, and the ending was not satisfying. Lippman's handling of two different time frames is well done and the tantalizing juxtaposition of past and present creates the best moments of the story. However, the resolution of the converging stories is much weaker than I expected, and left too much unexplained.

Wilde Lake by Laura Lippman is a 2016 William Morrow publication. One- part family saga, one- part mystery- Luisa “Lu” Brant, a newly elected state’s attorney is drawn into a case that on the surface isn’t all that sexy. A homeless man kills a woman, but the case suddenly thrusts Lu back in time- to 1980- when an incident at Wilde Lake, involving her brother, one that may have come back to haunt them all. This story leans more towards buried secrets, family entanglements, and relationships, tha...

This book contains one of the most unlikeable protagonists that I have ever met.Luisa "Lu" Brant is the first female states attorney of Howard County. As her first murder case comes up - a woman beaten and choked to death in her bedroom she takes it, a seemingly open and shut case - the perpetrator being a homeless drifter with a history of violence. But as she starts to look into the case it seems to be more to it than she initially thought, and ties back to memories she has as a young child.Th...

DiffuseForget the dark-and-stormy-night implications of the garish cover. Far from wild, Wilde Lake is the man-made centerpiece of a manicured subdivision in a new town arising out of the idealism of the later sixties: Columbia, Maryland. Laura Lippman makes no bones about this; one of the most interesting things about her new book (especially for a reader who came to America at about this time and lives close by) is the time-capsule it offers of its place and period. The novel proceeds in at-fi...

The last (and only) Laura Lippman book I've read previous to Wilde Lake was The Girl in the Green Raincoat in 2013. I had to look up the summary of the book to remember what the book was about and why I gave it 2 stars. Even after reading the blurb, I still can't remember many details so I was a bit leery about investing my time in another lackluster book by this author. I'm so glad I did. This was a well crafted, engaging mystery that was not the least bit predictable. 5 stars for a book that I...

3.5★sLuisa Brant’s mother died a week after Lu was born – her brother AJ was eight so was lucky to have had his mother for those first years of his life. Lu and AJ’s father was a highly respected member of the community in which they lived; State Attorney of Howard County in Maryland. The three of them lived together in their big home with housekeeper/carer/nanny Teensy working days – Lu’s father wasn’t a demonstrative man, but cared for them just the same.When AJ was eighteen there was an alter...

Written well, just not what I was hoping for.

Finding Lippman's Sunburn this year to be a 5 star studded book, I found a couple of her older books in audio from OverDrive. This is the first of those, and it is thoughtful in its plotting, full of old secrets that if revealed could change her family and how she sees it. The audio version employed different female voices to tell of Lu's motherless childhood and her adult years as an elected state's attorney, following in her father's footsteps. Her first murder case brings back the time when h...

The famous Brandt family....could they do anything wrong or were they not able to because of their status? Or...did they do it anyway?The Brandt family was made up of attorneys and secrets.​ Lu and her brother AJ were eight years apart with Lu admiring AJ and his friends. The secrets kept all of those years of the night AJ saved someone's life along with another secret and how it affected their lives became apparent as the book continued.​Wilde Lake tells the story through flashbacks.​ The flash...

Bottom Line: Some things are just inescapable. Like the glaze of childhood upon our bones. Fraught, sometimes difficult times that revisit us. Plummeting deeper into the waters of wavering denial.Luisa Brant possesses a determined, tenacious spirit. This serves her well as the newly elected state attorney of Howard County, Maryland. Those bones have been well-formed as she has cut a path in the same vision as her famous attorney father. Newly widowed and a mother of twins, Lu takes residence wit...

“The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.” ----Anaïs NinLaura Lippman, an American bestselling author, pens an intriguing thriller in her new book, Wilde Lake that unfolds the story of the first female attorney of her county, who earns her first murder case, that looks like an easy win to her, but underneath the simple mystery lies a mind-blowing truth that will take this woman back to her childhood days when her only friend was h

Wilde Lake not only was an engrossing book it also gave me a new favorite author that I really need to read more books by. Why haven't I read anything by Laura Lippman before? Wilde Lake jumps between the present story with Luisa "Lu" Brant investigating as an attorney a murder and through flashbacks to the 80s do we get to know more about Lu's childhood, her growing up with her father and brother and a murder case that made her father, who was an attorney too, famous. We also learn about the ni...

Wilde Lake is a neighborhood in the town of Columbia, MD. Lippmann seems to agree with most of the common criticisms of this planned community founded in the late 60's by developer James Rouse. Not only was it designed to create a small city with a village feel, but has the lofty aims to eliminate racism and religious and class intolerance. Lippman mentions (more than once) the fact that Columbia has an interfaith center rather than places of worship for various faiths. This has been often criti...

RATING: 3 STARS2016; William Morrow/Harper CollinsIn Lippman's newest standalone novel she weaves the 1960s, 70s, 80s and present day to tell us about the Brant family. Lu Brant is following her father's footsteps when she is the newly appointed state's attorney of Howard County, Maryland. The first murder case that comes to her brings backs memories of her past, or rather her brother's coming of age story. As she delves into the murder case she is also uncovering secrets of her past - some that...

This new novel by Laura Lippman is a great disappointment. The story started with a memory from 1980 and then moved right into the current (1/1/15) time frame giving us the basis for the plot. After fewer than 10 pages we had another flashback, to another time period. And then another chapter in the current time and then another flashback to a still different time period.The flashbacks seemed to get more and more frequent, disregarding the actual plot completely. Also the flashbacks droned on an...

Of the three stand-alone novels I've read (i.e. those unrelated to the Tess Monaghan series) of Laura Lippman's prolific career, Wilde Lake is probably my favorite. As I mentioned in reviews of her The Most Dangerous Thing and I'd Know You Anywhere, Ms. Lippman's greatest asset is her ability of conveying sense of place. I don't know Baltimore at all, but I feel like I do after reading her stuff. (This ability is rivaled only by Dennis Lehane's gritty you-are-there Boston portraits and a few

My new favorite Lippman, which is saying something.

“The truth is messy, riotous, overrunning everything. You can never know the whole truth of anything. And if you could, you would wish you didn’t.”So what is the truth that state’s attorney Luisa “Lu” Brant is pursuing? She is getting ready to prosecute the case of a mentally disturbed homeless man who savagely beat a woman to death in her own apartment. There appears to be no connection between victim and perpetrator.As the truth of what happened that night gradually comes out, Lu begins to ref...