However, their relationship is just one strand in a complicated plot that involves the murders of two people-an 11-year-old girl, Tessie Fine, from an Orthodox Jewish family, and Cleo Sherwood, a young African American woman-one that receives a lot of media attention and one that doesn’t. She meets Ferdie Platt, a black patrolman, under not so honest circumstances (she pretends that her engagement ring is stolen so she can collect the insurance money) and soon they are having an affair that both must keep secret for a number of reasons (this is before the 1967 Loving decision). Yet, something isn’t quite right and Maddie makes a fateful decision not long after she hosts a dinner for her husband that involves a classmate she knew from high school-a nerdy kid who is now a local newscaster.Ī couple months after this dinner, Maddie has left her husband and her son (who refuses to come live with her) and rented an apartment in a less desirable part of town (read – not so many white people.) She is trying to figure out what her next move is, while also trying to figure out how to support herself. She has married Milton Schwartz (who is both rich and reliable), birthed and raised a son, and manages her household with ease. The backbone of this novel is the story of Maddie Schwartz who seems on track to live a perfectly ordinary upper-class Jewish life in 1960’s Baltimore. There is a Tess connection here but you’ll have to wait until the end of the book to discover it. I am a fan of Lippman’s-have been ever since I read the first Tess Monaghan book-Baltimore Blues.
Though Laura Lippman’s newest novel is not the first book I started in 2020, it is the first I finished, thanks to a four-hour plane ride and a pile of newly downloaded library books on my Kindle.
0 kommentar(er)
