BOOKISH FRIDAY: EXCERPTING “WILDE LAKE”

Welcome to another Bookish Friday, in which I  share excerpts from books…and connect with other bloggers, who do the same.

Let’s begin the celebration by sharing Book Beginnings, hosted by Rose City Reader; and let’s showcase The Friday 56 with Freda’s Voice.

To join in, just grab a book and share the opening lines…along with any thoughts you wish to give us; then turn to page 56 and excerpt anything on the page.

Then give us the title of the book, so others can add it to their lists!

What better way to spend a Friday!

Today’s featured book is a fairly new one from an old favorite author, Laura Lippman.  Wilde Lake is an evocative and psychologically complex story about a long-ago death that still haunts a family.

 

 

 

 

Book Beginning:  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.  He was the one with murder in his heart and, sure enough, death found him that night.  Funny how that works.

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56%:  I threw my stick down and jumped him.  He was a runty kid, probably one reason he picked on me.  And he wore the same clothes almost every day, come to think of it, which was worse than wearing new clothes that people thought silly.

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Synopsis:  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.

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What do you think?  Have you read this one?  Is it one you would pick up?

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