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 BALTIMORE
— Novelist and former The Baltimore Sun Laura Lippman
has dedicated her latest book to the five victims of
last year’s Capital Gazette newsroom attack.
“The
Lady in the Lake,” which Lippman describes as a
“weird love letter to the Baltimore newspapers of the
’60s,” is dedicated to Rob Hiaasen, Gerald Fischman,
John McNamara, Rebecca Smith and Wendi Winters, who died
in the June 28 attack on the paper’s Annapolis
newsroom.
Lippman,
who was friends with Hiaasen, said she turned in the
final draft of the novel to her publisher the day before
the shooting. When she heard about the attack, she was
driving to visit her mother in Delaware and spent the
day on the phone with other former Sun colleagues who
knew people at the Capital Gazette, hoping they were all
safe.
Dedicating
the novel to the five who died was “a small thing, a
meaningless thing I could do,” Lippman said.
“It
seemed to make sense to me — it’s a newspaper novel;
it was eerie timing,” she said in a phone interview
Sunday. “They deserved to be memorialized. They were
doing their job, a job that is upheld in the
constitution as one of the pillars of our democracy.”
Lippman’s
husband, David Simon, another former Sun reporter who
went on to create HBO’s “The Wire,” tweeted a
photo Saturday of the dedication page, which reads:
“In memory of: Rob Hiaasen, Gerald Fischman, John
McNamara, Rebecca Smith, Wendi Winters.”
Baltimore
author Laura Lippman offers a glimpse of her next book,
‘Lady in the Lake’
The five
Capital Gazette staff members were killed by a gunman at
the newspaper’s Annapolis office in June. Despite the
attack on their newsroom, their colleagues put out a
newspaper the following day and have been recognized as
TIME Magazine’s 2018 Persons of the Year, along with
many other accolades.
A Laurel,
Md., man with a long-standing grudge against The Capital
faces 23 criminal counts in the shooting and is seeking
more time to consider an insanity plea, the newspaper
has reported.
Jarrod
Ramos, 39, has pleaded not guilty to charges including
murder, attempted murder and assault of other employees
in the newsroom at the time. The trial is scheduled for
June 3 to 14.
“The
Lady in the Lake,” set in 1966, is about “a
middle-class, not-quite-middle-aged woman who bolts from
her marriage and decides she’s going to find
significance and meaning in her own life by
investigating the suspicious death of an
African-American woman,” Lippman said.
The story
is based in part on the still-unsolved 1960s death of a
woman, Shirley Partridge, in a fountain in Druid Hill
Park.
The
novel, published by Faber & Faber, will be available
for purchase July 23.
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