Lady in the Lake Treads Shallow Waters

There’s a difference between a story that’s narratively big versus thematically big. Laura Lippman’s immersively imagined and cleverly written Lady in the Lake—about a pair of murders in 1960s Baltimore, the woman who finds herself unexpectedly connected to both, and how she uses them to further her own ambitions—understood the distinction between a story that lets its characters’ lives unfurl into messy, unpleasant places and one that binds them too tightly to forces beyond their control.