TV & Movies
The Lady in the Lake Book Ending Has A Massive Twist
Not everything is as it seems.
When author Laura Lippman was writing Lady in the Lake — on which a new Apple TV+ series is based — she pulled inspiration from two real-life deaths in 1969 Baltimore, and interrogated the different media attention paid to each.
As Smithsonian Magzine explains, the death of a white child named Esther Lebowitz was “front-page news” that garnered much response; a young Black mother named Shirley Parker, in comparison, received “limited” coverage.
“I very much wanted to look at these two different deaths and how different they had been portrayed in media,” Lippman told NPR in 2019. “And I was like, well, what could possibly tie them together?”
To do this, she created a fictional journalist named Maddie Schwartz. The character (played by Natalie Portman) investigates criminal cases, several details of which Lippman has fictionalized.
If you want to take a peek ahead, here’s a recap of the Lady in the Lake’s book ending and plot summary.
An Eventful Second Act
In Lippman’s book, Maddie is a Baltimore housewife who decides to leave her husband and start life anew. She ultimately finds work at a local newspaper and begins dating a police officer named Ferdie. After helping to find the body of a young girl, Tessie, she begins investigating the murder and corresponds with the suspected killer, a pet-store clerk.
Later on, police find the body of a woman, Cleo (played by Moses Ingram), in a local park fountain. She’d been missing for months, and Maddie takes on the case.
In Lippman’s book, the two stories converge surprisingly. Maddie confronts the mother of the pet-store clerk and learns that the pair worked together to kill Tessie. The mother, Angela, stabs Maddie, who survives and is taken to a local hospital.
Lady In The Lake’s Fake Death Twist
While there, Maddie meets... Cleo. The real Cleo. As it turns out, Cleo was having an affair with a Senate candidate, Ezekiel, and her nightclub boss arranged for her to be killed to prevent her from impacting Ezekiel’s political career.
The body found in the fountain was actually Cleo’s roommate, Latetia. Cleo criticizes Maddie for getting involved and trying to dig up the truth and disappears from the hospital. Maddie keeps the secret of Cleo’s true identity.
She and Ferdie part ways after Maddie’s reporting implicates Ferdie as her secret police source. She goes on to become a celebrated journalist, and a final first-person passage from Cleo (who assumed her late roommate’s identity) reveals that she’s been able to achieve a happy, full life.
