The Nature of Things

I seem to be stuck in the '60s this summer. Most of the books that I've picked to read over the past several weeks have been set in that turbulent and thrilling decade. A coincidence of choice or a result of the fact that that era seems to be particularly popular territory for today's writers? A bit of both, I guess.  At any rate, Laura Lippman's new book is set primarily in 1966 Baltimore, a time when the Baltimore Orioles were good and racial tensions were high. I had never read Lippman before (My bad!) and didn't know what to expect from her. What I got was a tightly plotted mystery about the deaths of a young girl and a young woman which also explored the devaluation of women by the society of the period and the great chasm that existed between what women aspired to for their lives and what was actually expected of them and what they were allowed to achieve. I read somewhere that this book was inspired by Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar  which Lippman rev...