Wilde Lake by Laura Lippman

You know what's cool about Wilde Lake by Laura Lippman - she uses  To Kill A Mockingbird as an influence on the story.  Reminder: Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee was published in July 2015, and Wilde Lake was published in May 2016.  According to Lippman, she had already started her novel before Lee's second book was "found", as it were.  I just LOVE a story that is revisited or reworked from a different point of view, so I really enjoyed this aspect of Wilde Lake.  Done well, it enhances both the new work and the old one, because it calls you back and maybe helps you look at it a different way.

To wit, Lu (Louisa) is the first female state's attorney of her county in Maryland, following in the footsteps of her well-respected father, Andrew Brant.  Her brother AJ is the sort of person everyone admires, star athlete, strong student, friend to everyone.  They have a devoted black housekeeper, a gay neighbor kid that inserts himself into their lives, and, when they were younger, a girl from the wrong side of the tracks accused their black friend of raping her.

The story straddles two time-lines - one of Lu and her brother as teenagers (Lu a bit younger and sort of tagging along with AJ's friends.  For the most part, her father helps keep the accusation of the rape secret, everyone agreeing that it was most likely perpetrated by her abusive father.  In the present-day, Lu is taking the lead on a case of a woman murdered in her condo, with no apparent motive.  It's a good mystery, and she connects the dots nicely. 

Although Go Set a Watchman wasn't very well received, I quite liked parts of it, particularly the "you can't go home again" (to put it mildly) aspect.  Just as Scout finds that her father and brother aren't the white shining heroes of her youth, Lu is also struggling with interacting with her father as an adult, recognizing that the man she and so many others idolized isn't perfect.  There's also a continuing theme of how "people thought then".  Lu and other characters are grappling with how the casual racism and misogyny of the past continues to impact people today, and what the statute of limitations is on those actions.

He was a man of a certain generation, a man of his time. We always want our heroes to be better than their times, to hold the enlightened views we have achieved one hundred, fifty, ten years later. We want Jefferson to free his slaves and not to father children with any of them. We want Lindbergh to keep his Nazi sympathies to himself. We want Bill Clinton to keep it in his pants. Martin Luther King Jr., too.  And that's just what we expect of the men.  The present is swollen with self-regard for itself, but soon enough the present becomes the past. The present, this day, this very moment we inhabit - it all will be held accountable for the things it didn't know, didn't understand.