Wilde Lake

Wilde Lake is a 2016 detective novel by American author Laura Lippman. Set in Howard County, Maryland, it follows the local state’s attorney, Luisa “Lu” Brant, who prosecutes a mentally unstable drifter accused of brutally murdering a woman in her own home. Lu’s career follows in the footsteps of her father, also formerly a state’s attorney; soon enough, the trial unearths connections to a murder case he was never able to solve. The novel touches on themes that include the manipulation and failure of memory, and the difficulty of acting morally in the complex modern world.

The novel begins shortly after Lu Brant is elected to the state’s attorney post for Howard County. The first female state’s attorney, she is viewed by the public as a promising continuation of her father’s humanitarian legal work. Wanting to establish herself as a competent figure, Lu immediately sets her sights on one of the county’s most serious active cases, in which a woman named Mary McNally was found bludgeoned to death in her apartment. Because Howard County is small and remote, it sees few crimes; the murder of an innocent woman is therefore especially shocking. Lu prepares to go to trial by doing background research on the case. First, she goes to the crime scene, meeting the lead detective and Mary McNally’s neighbor, Jonnie Forke. Soon after, the police identify their first suspect, Rudy Drysdale, a traveling homeless man with mental illness. Lu’s brother, AJ, was in the same high school graduating class as Rudy, but claims not to know him. Rudy is interrogated and partially implicates himself in the killing, leading to formal charges.

Lu’s former boss and state’s attorney election rival, Fred, steps up to defend Rudy. Lu receives several messages from a woman, Eloise Schumann, who urges her to speak to her. Eloise claims that Lu has met her before; however, Lu does not return her calls because she can remember no such person. In the first days of the trial, Lu attends court for the jury selection process. Before recess, Rudy assaults her, feigning an attempt to flee, with the ulterior motive of being killed by police. The police detain him without killing him. Suspecting that Rudy might not be the killer, Lu continues to investigate, finding that Jonnie Forke is the pseudonym of another former classmate, Nita Flood, who knew AJ’s friend, Davey. At this point, Lu realizes that AJ lied about not knowing Rudy.



Lu delves into the high school relationships of all her persons of interest. She learns that Rudy, the school’s photographer, attended the cast party for a school musical, where Davey and his friend Noel showed up. During that party, two boys from a different school made fun of Rudy, who was known to be dyslexic. Davey and AJ protected Rudy; afterward, he followed their group of friends, often uninvited. The night of their graduation party, when AJ and Davey got into a fight with Ben Flood, Rudy killed Ben to pay them back for protecting him. Ever since, the group had maintained that Ben fell on his knife while trying to protect Rudy.

The story culminates when Lu learns that Nita had long suspected that her brother Ben’s death was not an accident. She sought to ruin Davey’s career as a  prominent minister by blackmailing him, as well as trying to expose AJ and Rudy through her role as a detective. AJ made the mistake of telling Rudy about the blackmail plot , at which time Rudy took his own initiative to try to kill Nita. In a confused rage, he broke into the wrong apartment and killed Mary McNally instead. Shortly after Rudy confirms this story to Lu, he commits suicide in his jail cell, bringing an end to the case. At the end of the novel, Lu speaks to Eloise Schumann, the former witness in Lu’s father’s famous murder case. Back when he was the state’s attorney, Lu’s father successfully convicted Eloise’s brother, Ryan Schumann, though the conviction was made upon very little evidence: His alleged victim’s body was never tracked down. Eloise tells her that Lu’s father knew she was the real killer, but charged Ryan instead. Eloise never came forth with the truth because she didn’t want to be charged. Lu becomes fully disillusioned with the law, resigning from the state’s attorney position to take care of her family. She writes the text of Wilde Lake, but then seals the text for 100 years to protect her own family.