Laura Lippman and her daughter headed up to New York last week for the big premiere of the Apple TV+ version of her 2019 novel “Lady In The Lake.” They got all done up by “the glam squad,” she recalled, then rubbed shoulders with stars Natalie Portman and Moses Ingram at the Museum of Arts and Design, in a crowd of about 200 people.

But what Lippman is really looking forward to is watching the show again when it debuts on a much smaller screen Friday with friends. “Maybe a dozen people,” she said. “That’s Baltimore!”

This is the second of Lippman’s books to make it to screen. “Every Secret Thing,” starring Diane Lane and Dakota Fanning, was released in 2014, though the recent “Prom Mom” has been optioned and ideas for the beloved Tess Monaghan series “are making the rounds,” she said.

But the scope of the production of “Lady In The Lake” is on a different level. Is it hard to watch one of your literary babies be reimagined by someone else? “Not really,” Lippman said matter-of-factly. “I know I am not a screenwriter. I’ve been going to the movies by myself a lot lately, and more than ever I respect what they do. It’s a huge learning curve. I’ve fallen in love with movies all other again.”

The former Baltimore Sun reporter never wanted or expected the show to be “indebted” to her novel, though she found herself noting the deviations from her work when she saw the first two episodes back in March. “It wasn’t judgmental,” she said. “Watching it again, I found I was no longer cataloguing the differences. I thought, ‘Wait a minute! This is bigger.’ The stakes had to be higher.”

Set in the 1960s, “Lady In The Lake” is about separated Pikesville housewife Maddie (Portman) becoming entwined in the story of a missing Black woman, Cleo (Ingram). It closely examines Baltimore’s racial and class divide, with a well-developed portrayal of the Black community. I told Lippman that pleased me since what were considered definitive Baltimore TV shows and movies of my youth often lacked that perspective.

“Baltimore is like a jazz classic, like ‘My Funny Valentine.’ There are as many versions as there are people to play it. But in an ideal world there would be more versions by now,” said Lippman, who acknowledges that media often “uses Black pain to tell a story. I’ve done it. I can’t solve the representation problem in publishing, but there should be a dozen Baltimore stories.”

She enjoyed some of the touches that director Alma Har’el added to the script to provide the connectivity of those stories across racial and cultural lines. “It was interesting adding the idea that innocent Black men could be implicated” in the disappearance of the missing white girl, as well as the addition of Slappy, Cleo’s estranged husband (Byron Bowers), as “a sly way to introduce the community without saying outright, ‘And this is what it’s like to be a Black man in 1966.’”

Lippman was so pleased with the outcome that she wrote “effusive” thank-you notes to Har’el, Portman and Ingram, the latter of whom soulfully embodies the guarded Cleo. “It sounds a little bizarre, but Cleo kept me at arm’s length, too,” said the woman who created her. “Even with your own characters, you don’t get to know everything. I wrote Moses, ‘She belongs to you now.’”

Ingram is a Baltimore native, and Cleo, like many Black residents, doesn’t speak in the stereotypical “Hey, hon” accent. But several characters do, and it was fun watching the actors give it a valiant shot despite it consisting of pronunciations a lot of people outside of the area don’t recognize.

Lippman recalled that when Towson University graduate John Glover did the locally set 1980s NBC sitcom “The Days And Nights of Molly Dodd,” he “went for it” with the accent, resulting in letters and calls to NBC asking if he was supposed to be mentally challenged.

This led into a delightful demonstration of Baltimore accents, and I’m telling you that you’ve not had a Baltimore evening until you’ve sat in a bar with Laura Lippman trying to find the perfect local pronunciation of “ambulance.” (And it’s “amblance.”)

She’s pretty happy with the Baltimore the show created, including the sets. “What about that Pennsylvania Avenue?” she asked about the recreation of a 1960s version of the then-bustling street. “The view of it at night made me literally gasp.”

Lippman will get to see what the locals think at her neighborhood watch party tomorrow. As much fun as the premiere was, she said, “this is the highlight.”