Ponder Post: Wilde Lake

The opening lines of Laura Lippman's Wilde Lake are an attention getter:

When my brother was eighteen, he broke his arm in an accident that ended in another young man's death. I wish I could tell you that we mourned the boy who died but we did not.

This immediately brought to my mind the opening lines of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mocking Bird:

When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. When it healed and Jem's fears of never being able to play football again were assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious about his injury.

Both books are told as viewed through the childhood eyes of a young girl whose father is a lawyer and single parent. Both books are set in a small southern town. To Kill a Mockingbird, narrated by Scout, takes place in Alabama while Wilde Lake, told by Luisa, takes place in Maryland. To Kill a Mockingbird deals with a town's racial prejudice. By contrast, Wilde Lake is a very forward-thinking, accepting community - but is it really? How sincere is political correctness? Both books are equally stellar in my opinion.

A writing technique in Laura Lippman used in Wilde Lake has chapters narrated in first person from Luisa's vantage point as a naive young girl as well as chapters told in third person by Luisa as a grown female professional. I found it refreshingly creative. When the author retells a scene with the added retrospective and context of an adult, the interpretation can be very different. The juxtaposition of viewpoints is endearingly indicative of childhood innocence. I liked that, at the start of a chapter, the book alerts the reader to a transition between these two time periods immediately by using a san serif font for the childhood perspective and a font with serifs for the adult viewpoint narrative. Clever. And helpful.

There are many turns and surprises in this book interwoven around the main plot line of a criminal investigation associated with a murder trial. Like many crime drama series on television these days, CASTLE and BONES for example, there is a back story to the characters investigating the crime. Often the back story is as riveting or more so than the crime itself. This is the case with Wilde Lake. The crime takes a back seat to the personal lives of Luisa's family.

Laura Lippman is a New York Times best selling author and I think the title is well deserved. I am definitely going to seek out and read some of her other works. She has stand alone titles as well as a Tess Monaghan crime series. In researching her a bit, I found this blog post of hers amusing and thought-provoking. It is from a recent post dated May 11, 2016 and titled PC: Politically Correct or Just Profoundly Conscious? Here is the url for it.
http://www.lauralippman.net/blog/2016/5/11/9hvsukp2xl7a043oa5gjgsu4jrbupu

I definitely recommend this book. I was a bit disappointed with the ending but I think that is more a matter of my opinion and character attachment than a lack of worthiness from a literary point of view. The book was a page turner with nuggets of surprises laden throughout. I now have a new author to strongly consider when selecting my next book to read.