Death In Her Hands – Ottessa Moshfegh

You might have missed Death In Her Hands when it first came out, given that it was mid-2020 when we were all frantically scrubbing our hands to the tune of Happy Birthday and stockpiling toilet paper – but don’t let it pass you by completely. Luckily, I have a finely tuned radar set to ping whenever Ottessa Moshfegh releases a new book, so I snatched up a copy, and got around to reading it just six years later.

Death In Her Hands has a killer opening line:

Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.

Death In Her Hands (Page 1)

These words are found, written neatly on a piece of note paper, by a 72 year old woman out walking her dog. The thing is, there’s no body. Magda is nowhere in evidence. There’s no blood or weapon or sign of a struggle – just the note, on the ground, weighed down by some rocks.

The woman who discovers the note is Vesta. She is relatively-recently and mostly-happily widowed. She moved to this small town in the woods after her husband’s death – she knows no one, and she has very little company, besides her dog Charlie. The discovery of this note is the closest thing she’s had to a social interaction in months.

With little else to occupy her mind, Vesta becomes fixated on the note. She begins to imagine a whole life for Magda, and then the murderer, and then the note-leaver. Soon, it’s more than an idle fantasy – it tips over the edge into a true obsession. She visits the library and Asks Jeeves how to solve a murder. She closely observes everyone around her. Soon, everything she sees becomes a clue.

Death In Her Hands is a very interior novel, with an extremely unreliable narrator. How much of what Vesta sees, hears, and thinks is real? How much is imagined, as a result of loneliness, grief, or even dementia? Moshfegh is a truly remarkable writer, and she refuses to make it easy for the reader in this send-up of the detective novel. Death In Her Hands is less of a whodunnit and more of a diditreallyhappen.

It would have been an easy five-star read for me, except that towards the end, Charlie goes missing and (gulp) meets a truly horrific fate – dog-lovers, be warned. For my own sanity, I choose to believe that what happens on the page is imagined by Vesta entirely, and that Charlie is ‘really’ living a long and happy life in the woods where there’s lots of sticks to play with. Aside from this deeply traumatic chapter, Death In Her Hands is a practically perfect novel.

Read Death In Her Hands on audiobook via Libro.fm here.

My favourite Amazon reviews of Death In Her Hands:

• “in chapter two there is this exaggerated description of a fat woman eating donuts that is so unrealistic and fatphobic that I am not going to continue to read. Eat crumbs, Otessa.” – praiselemonade
• “Meandering, trivial nothingness. you really get the feeling Ottessa didn’t really know what story she wanted to write after the success of her previous book but said “you know what, maybe I don’t know have to know! This is MY year of rest and relaxation!” and just made it up as she went along.” – maxxism
• “This is navel gazing of the highest order, that combines deep bigotry with animal cruelty without a coherent plot line.” – Anonymous Reader
• “The main character is a pretentious old woman. I was getting angrier and angrier with her. I just honestly did not like her. But I decided to stick with it. I kept telling myself, “oh, she’s pure malice, but she’s not as bad as my MIL”.” – Kindle Customer
• “This book made me wish I was illiterate! I’ve never disrespected a book in my life but I’m going to douse this one with petrol and set it alight in the forest. I’m just glad I didn’t download it to my iPad because I’d have to find a way to burn an iPad.” – Carie Craze