The ghost of a poor young black woman murdered in Baltimore in 1965; the high spirits of a wealthy 30-something Jewish housewife who leaves her “perfectly nice lawyer husband” to pursue a career in journalism and find the murderer of this victim whom no one cares about. These are the central elements of Laura Lippman’s stand-alone novel, “Lady in the Lake,” a brilliantly plotted, tautly written mystery-cum-psychological thriller cum social document of racial and sexual politics in the era of Lyndon B. Johnson and the Vietnam War.

Maddie Schwartz, nee Madelyn Morgenstern, “ran her household … with a sly wit and effortless — effortless-seeming — organization …. She accomplished these domestic miracles by spending freely.” When her husband invites a tennis partner and local TV personality to dinner at the last moment, Maddie acts the part of the perfect hostess. That night, “Maddie fell asleep paging through an imaginary calendar, trying to calculate the best time to leave her marriage.”

Cleo Sherwood was a young, beautiful black woman, living in poverty in a small apartment with her parents, a sister and two brothers, and her two young sons — each from a father who is no longer on the scene. “There was never a moment’s peace,” she says. “I had to find the kind of man who would provide for us, all of us … even if it meant living with my friend Laetitia, who basically ran a one-woman school on how to get men to pay for everything.”

The economic and social dynamics may have been different, but these two women had a lot in common. Each had the ability to make men do her bidding, and each felt powerless to accomplish anything on her own in a man’s world. Maddie — educated, better off financially than Cleo (although she struggles to make ends meet after leaving her husband, who does not want a divorce) — manages to get a modest apartment in a run-down neighborhood. She pulls a bit of insurance fraud with her diamond engagement ring, not only gets away with it but nabs a handsome “Negro” policeman as her secret lover in the process.

She meets with resistance from the mostly male staff when she applies for a job as reporter with the Baltimore Star but even there, by talent and determination, she gradually makes her way. Her career is helped somewhat, when she finds two bodies to write about: Cleo’s, as well as that of an 11-year-old Jewish girl named Tessie Fine.

Cleo is not so lucky. She plays with fire and ends up as a body in a fountain, disrespectfully referred to as “the lady in the lake,” after being discovered by none other than Maddy. “Are you really missing if nobody misses you,” Cleo asks, from her watery grave. Tessie Fine’s death is newsworthy. No one is interested in writing about the fate of a black woman presumed to be a prostitute. “There’s no story in Cleo Sherwood being killed,” Maggie is told, by her own black boyfriend. “She was just a girl who went out with the wrong man.”

Ms. Lippman tells her ingenious story alternately in a third person narration about Maddie’s life, and interspersed chapters in the first person voice of the various people she encounters in searching for the murderers of the two victims. Those characters are actually the most interesting portraits in the novel. Among them are reporters and columnists, bereaved parents, a jewelry store saleswoman, a pet store sales clerk, the patrolman-lover, a sleazy politician, a waitress in a dead-end job, a white bartender in a black bar, a moviegoer who causes a stir by fondling Maddie’s knee, even a medium who presciently forecasts danger ahead. And the crowd includes a few “Baltimore bachelors” — the discreet term for a gay man in that time and place.

“I’m in danger?” Maddie asks the fortune teller.

“No, you are danger,” she replies. “You’re going to hurt someone terribly, cause all kinds of trouble.” Needless to say, those words don’t deter Maddie for a single moment.

What these people have to say is more telling and insightful than anything Maddie herself can dig up. A former classmate of Maddie points out early on, for example, that “there’s no one more anti-Semitic than a middle class Jew.” A betrayed wife asks herself whether “pretending someone doesn’t exist [is] the same as not knowing they’re alive? — then how can I know anything about how she died?” Ignorance is bliss to a lot of the characters in this book — until it isn’t. That’s part of Ms. Lippman’s message, in a historical panorama that goes far beyond the bounds of a mere murder mystery.

Robert Croan is a Post-Gazette senior editor.

First Published: September 7, 2019, 2:00 p.m.