She goes to the library and consults Ask Jeeves – “Is Magda dead?” “How does one solve a mystery?” She finds a webpage with tips for mystery writers and fills out a character profile questionnaire. With nothing but the note to go on, Vesta spins out her own story of Magda’s apparent murder, imagining the woman (19, with dark hair) and populating her life with potential suspects (a boy she names Blake, a ghoul she names Ghod). Unfortunately, it never stops feeling like an extended writing exercise, aimless and haphazardly conceived, bloated at 260 pages with generous margins. Moshfegh is a gifted writer, with an excellent ear for rhythm and detail, and her prose, along with the promise that something interesting might happen, makes the book a quick and sometimes enjoyable read. There’s a pleasing, incantatory quality to those lines, as well as a clear sense of intrigue, and they serve as a sort of prompt for the novel, sending Vesta into a funhouse of speculation and dark fabulation, layered with the shadows of her own personal demons. Here is her dead body.' She finds no dead body.ĥ books not to miss: Jasmine Guillory's 'Party of Two,' Julie Clark's 'The Last Flight'īook review: 'World War Z' author Max Brooks wreaks havoc with Bigfoot in 'Devolution' One morning, she discovers a handwritten note in the birch woods, the text of which supplies the book’s opening: “Her name was Magda. And I had no friends, nobody to meet for lunch, to go to the cinema, even to chat to on the phone. Her existence is solitary by choice, but also decidedly lonely: “It had been so long since I’d socialized at all. Vesta Gul is an elderly widow who lives with her dog, Charlie, in a cabin on a lake in a small, snowy town, far away from her old life with her recently deceased husband.

'Death in Her Hands' (Penguin Press, 272 pp., ★★½ out of four) is the author’s latest treatise on malignant isolation, a rambling, close-up psychodrama that explores the mysteries of an unreliable mind. Quarantine got you down? At least you’re not the protagonist of an Ottessa Moshfegh novel.

Death in her hands book review