Lady in the Lake by Laura Lippman

In 1966, Maddie Schwartz decides to separate from her husband, Milton, and move out on her own. She gets a job at the Star newspaper as an assistant to the reporter who writes the help column. Maddie, though, has bigger journalistic aspirations, which only increase after she is involved in finding the body of missing child, Tessie Fine. Next, she is determined to find out who murdered Cleo Sherwood, an African-American woman who was found dead in a lake. No one is interested in pursuing what happened to Cleo--neither the police nor the media. Everyone tells Maddie to move on, that she is treading in dangerous waters, but she refuses. In Lady in the Lake, Lippman tells the story of Maddie, Cleo, and a 1966 Baltimore through the eyes of all sorts of characters in the city. It's an interesting story that stands apart from her other standalone novels that I've read.