Rating: Not rated
Tags: Fiction
Summary
A novel of haunting
metaphysical suspense about an elderly widow whose life is
upturned when she finds a cryptic note on a walk in the woods
that ultimately makes her question everything about her new
home.
While on her normal daily walk with her dog in the
forest woods, our protagonist comes across a note,
handwritten and carefully pinned to the ground with a frame
of stones. "Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who
killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body". Our
narrator is deeply shaken; she has no idea what to make of
this. She is new to area, having moved her from her longtime
home after the death of her husband, and she knows very few
people. And she's a little shaky even on best days. Her
brooding about this note quickly grows into a full-blown
obsession, and she begins to devote herself to exploring the
possibilities of her conjectures about who this woman was and
how she met her fate. Her suppositions begin to find echoes
in the real world, and with mounting excitement and dread,
the fog of mystery starts to form into a concrete and
menacing shape. But as we follow her in her investigation,
strange dissonances start to accrue, and our faith in her
grip on reality weakens, until finally, just as she seems be
facing some of the darkness in her own past with her late
husband, we are forced to face the prospect that there is
either a more innocent explanation for all this or a much
more sinister one - one that strikes closer to home.
A triumphant blend of horror, suspense, and pitch-black
comedy, 'Death in Her Hands' asks us to consider how the
stories we tell ourselves both guide us closer to the truth
and keep us at bay from it. Once again, we are in the hands
of a narrator whose unreliability is well earned, only this
time the stakes have never been higher.