Death In Her Hands

"[An] intricate & unsettling new novel . . . Death in Her Hands is not a murder mystery, nor is it really a story about self-deception or the perils of escapism. Rather, it's a haunting meditation on the nature & meaning of art." — Kevin Power, The New Yorker

From Ottessa Moshfegh - one of our most ceaselessly provocative literary talents - a novel of haunting metaphysical suspense about an elderly widow whose life is upturned when she finds an ominous note on a walk in the woods. While on her daily walk with her dog in a secluded woods, a woman comes across a note, handwritten & carefully pinned to the ground by stones. "Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body." But there is no dead body. Our narrator is deeply shaken; she has no idea what to make of this. She is new to this area, alone after the death of her husband, & she knows no one. Becoming obsessed with solving this mystery, our narrator imagines who Magda was & how she met her fate. With very little to go on, she invents a list of murder suspects & possible motives for the crime. 

Oddly, her suppositions begin to find correspondences in the real world, & with mounting excitement & dread, the fog of mystery starts to fade into menacing certainty. As her investigation widens, strange dissonances accrue, perhaps associated with the darkness in her own past; we must face the prospect that there is either an innocent explanation for all this or a much more sinister one. 

A triumphant blend of horror, suspense, & pitch-black comedy, Death in Her Hands asks us to consider how the stories we tell ourselves both reflect the truth & keep us blind to it. Once again, we are in the hands of a narrator whose unreliability is well earned, & the stakes have never been higher.