She is new to this area, alone after the death of her husband, and she knows no one.īecoming obsessed with solving this mystery, our narrator imagines who Magda was and how she met her fate. Our narrator is deeply shaken she has no idea what to make of this. Here is her dead body.' But there is no dead body. While on her daily walk with her dog in a secluded woods, a woman comes across a note, handwritten and carefully pinned to the ground by stones. Rather, it's a haunting meditation on the nature and meaning of art.'įrom 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. Death in Her Hands is not a murder mystery, nor is it really a story about self-deception or the perils of escapism. Once again, we are in the hands of a narrator whose unreliability is well earned, and the stakes have never been higher.' intricate and unsettling new novel. 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.Ī triumphant blend of horror, suspense, and pitch-black comedy, Death in Her Hands asks us to consider how the stories we tell ourselves both reflect the truth and keep us blind to it. Oddly, her suppositions begin to find correspondences in the real world, and with mounting excitement and dread, the fog of mystery starts to fade into menacing certainty. With very little to go on, she invents a list of murder suspects and possible motives for the crime.

Death in her hands novel