Ottessa Moshfegh is the author of the darkly funny and bizarre My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which I read back in 2022 and enjoyed. This inspired me to read Moshfegh’s Death in Her Hands, which I came across in the bargain section at my local independent bookstore. I did not enjoy Death in Her Hands. It is one of those books where the idea is better than the execution.

Death in Her Hands is about an elderly woman named Vesta Gul who has moved to a cabin in the woods with her beloved dog, Charlie, after the death of her husband. One day while on a walk in the woods with Charlie, Vesta finds a handwritten note on the ground that says, “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body”. But there is no body.

Vesta is not sure what to make of the note, but it doesn’t take long for her to become obsessed with it. She concocts a rather elaborate backstory for Magda, who may or may not be a real person, and Magda’s murder. She creates her own list of suspects before doing any investigation and without really knowing anyone who lives in the area. Then Vesta begins to meet the people from her intricate fantasy of Magda’s life. Or does she? The thing with Death in Her Hands is that you don’t really know what is going on. Is everything that happens to Vesta really happening, or is it all in her head?

I like the unreliable narrator trope, but this novel’s ending is too abstruse for me to parse. I also do not like Vesta as a character. My Year of Rest and Relaxation also has a protagonist that is not particularly likeable, but I could at least empathize with her. Vesta, on the other hand, is the kind of senior citizen that I am afraid of becoming. She initially seems to be sympathetic when you learn that she was married to a much older man who controlled her life, and who was condescending and insulting towards her, and apparently unfaithful. His death was a liberation for her. But instead of making the most of her freedom, she secludes herself from the rest of the world – she doesn’t even have a TV or a phone – and lives too much inside her own head, and it is not a healthy environment. She turns out to be just as condescending and insulting as her late husband (she has a weird and cruel fixation with how fat the people are in her rural American community). I cannot recommend Death in Her Hands. I should also mention the trigger warning for those who do not like to read about animal death.