"Wilde Lake" by Laura Lippman

An audio book.

In 1980 the narrator Lu is a schoolgirl living with her state attorney father and older brother AJ. She could read at 6. Her mother died a week after giving birth to her. At a party the Flood brothers stabbed AJ's friend, thinking that he raped their sister. AJ killed one of them. He got off, went to do Law at Yale.

30+ years later, Lu returns to become state's attorney. She's not good at recalling names and faces. She was widowed at 40, with 2 kids. Twins. They all live with her retired father. AJ, 53, has remarried and has become rich by going Green. She realised rather late that her father had had girlfriends. She's taken on a murder case. The prime suspect is a homeless guy who broke into a flat.

She hadn’t fancied her brother’s friend Bash when she was little. He’s married now, 53, and she has sex with him every month or so. The suspect Rudi was known to her brother at school. He was a photographer. She interviews his parents, hoping to get evidence of previous violence. She thinks he stabbed his father. They've paid for expensive legal help.

We learn about some of her father's cases. She used a surrogate mother for her twins (now she tells us!). AJ asks her about the options because his new wife doesn't want a pregnancy or his old semen, but she'd like a child.

We learn more about her father and AJ in the past. There are things she remembers but only now understands.

At school she tried hard to be popular - wearing the right clothes, etc. She befriended a boy, Randy, until he wanted to kiss her.

Her father got someone imprisoned for life when she was 6. A woman, Eloise, comes to her saying that the man had died in prison and was innocent. She'd married him. She claims to have committed the murder herself. Her account isn't new - her father knew it. It's unreliable.

She goes through old records of the Flood death. Lu's brother was at Davy's house with a couple of friends when the Flood girl turned up. She and Davy (tall, black, clever) had been having secret sex for a while. They all got drunk. They gave the Flood girl a lift home. Next day she had bruises and accused Davy of raping her. More likely her father had beaten her for getting drunk. Maybe Davy smoked grass too.

Rudi had broken into the flat. His semen was on the bed. Had he been masturbating when the home-owner came in? Had he attacked her through embarrassment when she returned home? Why were his fingerprints on the thermostat? At a pre-trial he attacks Lu and runs - "suicide by cop"? In a cell later he kills himself.

3/4 through the book we learn that Noel, a friend of AJ, died at 26 (AIDS) and that Davy had been wheelchaired by the Flood brothers' attack on him (now she tells us!). He subsequently turned religious. He's been a public figure for a decade or so.

The flat next to the murdered woman belongs to the Flood woman (single, with a very ill grand-daughter). She claims that though she and Davey were lovers, that night the sex was against her wishes. Lu wonders if she'd blackmailed Davy and she was the intented victim.

After a hint from AJ she looks for her mother's death certificate. She didn't die a week after Lu's birth but 15 years later. Her father told Lu that her mother had tried several times to kill herself and had been committed.

She asks AJ more about the rape night. Rudi had been outside and had seen how Davey had disowned the Flood girl in front of his friends, how after she'd passed out, she'd been gangbanged. Rudi had later killed the Flood brother. AJ had felt responsible for this, and had taken the blame knowing that he'd get off. He's the one who had recently paid to get Rudi an expensive lawyer.

Lu re-assesses her life. She resigns. She talks to Eloise and works out what really happened. She pays Eloise off. AJ kills himself.

At the end we learn that the book is going to be deposited in a vault, not to be opened for a 100 years.

Other reviews

• Declan Hughes (There is a certain type of recurring Lippman heroine: driven, competitive, highly intelligent, healthily interested in food and men and musical theatre, possessed of a bone-dry wit, simultaneously with a need to impress and a brutally relaxed attitude to making mistakes, to saying and doing the unpopular thing.)
• Goodreads