Death in Her Hands is Ottessa Moshfegh’s fourth novel, published in 2020.
Vesta Gul, a 72-year-old widow, finds the note at the top of the page while walking her dog Charlie in the birch woods near her house in Levant. She finds the note, but no body. Questions tantalize her. Who was Magda? Who wrote the note? And of course, who actually did kill Magda?
With no body and no other evidence to go on, Vesta spins a tale out of her imagination. Magda was an Eastern European émigré working at a McDonald's in nearby Bethsmane, but her work visa ran out and she had to go off the grid. She was living in a woman’s basement, and Blake—the author of the note—was the woman’s son. But then Magda fell victim to a sinister figure named Ghod.
Vesta leaves her house and goes into the wider town to run errands and seek leads. The interactions are strange, sometimes indistinguishable from those she makes up in her head. She’s faced with another, more urgent mystery when Charlie disappears. And as she attempts to solve both mysteries, more is revealed about her former marriage to the late Walter Gul and her precarious mental state.
Tropes in this novel include:
- Bat Deduction: Vesta’s entire “investigation” of Magda’s case is based on this. Essentially turning Sherlock Holmes’s advice on how “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data,” on its head, she simply makes up characters and tries to determine which of these fictional people is culpable. Her motto is “A good detective presumes more than she investigates.” Of course she doesn’t actually solve anything.
- Canine Companion: Ultimately subverted. While Vesta and Charlie initially appear to have a close bond—one of her more endearing traits—when he returns he attacks her and she kills him in self-defense.
- Domestic Abuse: The more Vesta reveals about Walter and his treatment of her the crueler he comes off.
- God Is Evil: Vesta hints at this belief by naming the villain of her story “Ghod.”
- Hollywood New England: Levant appears to be somewhere in the Northern New England, although the state is never named.
- Meaningful Name: Vesta was a Roman goddess of the hearth and home, while “Gul” sounds like “ghoul.” The implication is that she is haunting her own house in some way.
- Metafiction: With no apparent clues, Vesta’s investigation becomes an exercise in storytelling and a synecdoche for the writing process. It could be argued that while she utterly fails as a detective, she succeeds as an author, albeit with only herself as a readership.
- Mockstery Tale: It’s never revealed what happened to Magda, if there even was a Magda. In fact it’s plausible that Vesta herself wrote the note and somehow forgot about it.
- Summer Campy: Vesta’s house is on the grounds of a shuttered Girl Scout camp, and a few characters describe it as scary.
- The Topic of Cancer: One meeting Vesta has with her neighbors is with a husband and wife dressed in Victorian garb. The wife is dying of cancer and foregoing chemo, and they’re having a murder mystery weekend as one of her last wishes.
- Unreliable Narrator: Vesta is highly unreliable, bordering on Through the Eyes of Madness. While strange things do happen, it’s impossible to tell where reality leaves off and her paranoia takes up.
