Real Disappearances Are The Premise For Laura Lippman's 'Lady In The Lake'

Novelist Laura Lippman doesn't say her stories are "ripped from the headlines" — she says they're "inspired by crimes." Inspiration for Lippman's latest crime novel, Lady in the Lake, came from two real-life disappearances in 1960s Baltimore — one a girl, one a young woman, one white, one black. "When I decided to write a novel set in the '60s, I very much wanted to look at these two different deaths, and how differently they had been portrayed in media," she says.

In real life, the deaths were unrelated, but in the book, Lippman ties them together through her protagonist Maddie Schwartz — a beautiful, bored, 37-year-old housewife who decides one day to leave her husband and become a crime reporter.

"I set out simply to write a novel about a woman who