Death in Her Hands by Otessa Moshfegh

There was so much more work to be done. There were people to locate, to question, and how I would do this was unclear. I was not a detective. I had no magnifying glass, no handcuffs. I was a civilian. I was a little old lady, according to most people. I'd have to sneak, I'd have to sniff. I'd have to be a fly on the wall, and overhear what I could, glean, detect things through vibrations. I'd have to use my psychic abilities. Didn't Walter always say I was a witch?

Vesta Gul, an old woman who has just fled to a remote cabin after the death of her husband, is walking through the woods one day when she discovers a scrap of paper. The words written there: "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--only the scrap of paper. Is it the beginning of a novel or a story? Or a confession? Vesta begins to obsess over the paper, which she takes as a call to become a detective, to solve the murder of the mysterious Magda, but her method of investigation is peculiar. This is a woman, after all, who needs help from the librarian to figure out how to Ask Jeeves. Instead, she begins to imagine everything about the case, starting with Magda, whom she imagines as a beautiful young emigrant, to a series of wholly invented suspects: her boyfriend, her lover, her abusive landlady, and a mysterious ghoul, who also might be a police officer, whose name is Ghod.

Moshfegh's books are always best when she pulls the reader deep into the psyche of some isolated, alienated person who doesn't quite understand the world around them. Like the protagonists of Eileen and My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Vesta doesn't quite have an outer world available to confirm or disqualify her imaginings, which is what allows them to linger and proliferate. We understand quickly that, in Vesta's case, what she's really doing is processing her relationship with her now-dead husband, whom she never was able to see clearly during his life. In imagining Magda as a beautiful, rebellious victim, she is in a way coming to understand the way that Walter circumscribed her life and her potential. Moshfegh is too talented and too canny to make it a one-to-one comparison--Magda is not Vesta--and yet, thinking on Magda allows Vesta to bounce back and forth between the world of understanding and the world of imagination. What she ends up "solving" is not the killing of Magda, but the killing of her own spirit. Perhaps more obviously symbolic is the dog Charlie, who Vesta considers her one kindly companion, and who ends up turning on her violently.

That said, Death in Her Hands is a little too disinterested in the actual mystery at hand. Any reader who expects that something will ultimately be revealed about Magda or the writer of the page in the woods is in for a real disappointment. Ah, you can almost hear Moshfegh intoning behind the pages, but it isn't Magda who's the true subject of investigation... But the richest and most effective unreliable narrators, it seems to me, become rich through the ironic distance they create with what we assume is the "real" world, and I found Moshfegh's refusal to resolve the mystery of Magda pretty deflating. Instead, Moshfegh offers up a few symbolic sops--gasp! this shopkeeper has the same name as one of the imaginary suspects in Vesta's head!--that felt less than meaningful. Ultimately, I felt this to be one of those books that can never truly satisfy because the real drama, the real tension, is all back somewhere in the past, rather than the present.