Suspects include a man with facial scarring (“Hunting accident”), who works in a local store, and Vesta’s nearest neighbors, a wealthy couple who seem skittish about visitors to their land. Our detective, of course, is Vesta, who rapidly invents for Magda both a family (her father is “a man in a military hat”) and a writer of the note (Blake, “the shaggy blond boy on the skateboard”), and who sets out to solve the crime using the Internet (a bit) and her imagination (a lot). 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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