![]() ![]() All that’s missing from this murder mystery is the murder. We’ve been here before: the lonely woman in the haunted wood, the enigmatic note, the hunt for clues and closure. “ Death in Her Hands,” Ottessa Moshfegh’s intricate and unsettling new novel, appears at first to occupy familiar territory. Magda was a name for a character with substance.” Has Vesta stumbled upon a kind of confession? “It seemed so sinister all of a sudden. ![]() “This was not a Jenny or Sally or Mary or Sue. ![]() But isn’t “Magda,” as a name, a bit too particular, a bit too realistic, to have been chosen for a prank? Especially in Levant, the white-bread nowheresville town where Vesta lives. ![]() It’s a prank, Vesta thinks: “Somebody was playing games.” The woods disclose no evidence of any crime. Here is her dead body.” But there is no body. On a dawn walk in the birch forest near her isolated rural home, a seventy-two-year-old widow named Vesta Gul finds a handwritten note. Photograph by Jessica Lehrman / NYT / Redux Ottessa Moshfegh’s “Death in Her Hands” is a haunting meditation on the nature and meaning of art. ![]()
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