Like Ottessa Moshfegh’s first novel Eileen (2015), Death in Her Hands plays with the conventions of noir. Vesta Gul, a recently widowed 72-year-old, lives in a secluded lake cabin in rural New England. Walking her dog one day in the woods, she finds a cryptic note under a rock: ‘Her name was Magda,’ it reads. ‘Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.’ With no trace of a body or other clues in sight, Vesta pockets the note. Is it a prank, she wonders? Or ‘the beginning of a story tossed out as a false start, a bad opening’?
What follows is less of a whodunnit than a portrait of paranoiac unravelling in isolation. As Vesta’s imaginings eclipse her reality, she increasingly experiences what Moshfegh has called ‘Shirley Jackson moments’ — when ‘the everyday world becomes tinted with a sheen of terror’.
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