Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body. Isn’t that a great opening to a novel? Direct, but oblique. Clear, but puzzling and tantalizing. The words appear on a neat handwritten note that Vesta Gul finds when she’s on her daily walk in the woods near her home. Vesta, recently widowed, lives in a modest lakeside cabin with only her dog, Charlie, for company. Here is her dead body, the note says, but there’s no corpse, leaving Vesta to speculate about the victim, perpetrator, motive, and so much more. With almost nothing to work with, Vesta has the freedom to create a wildly elaborate narrative to explain the cryptic note, making Death in Her Hands a story about creating stories and the functions those stories perform in our lives.

Listen to anyone telling a story and you’ll learn much about the storyteller. That’s certainly true of Vesta Gul. As her imagination takes flight, we hear things about Vesta that she might not want us to know, about her snobbishness, her controlling husband, and her horrible marriage. Ottessa Moshfegh has written an intriguing, cryptic novel about the purpose and power of storytelling and the myths and memories we intertwine and confuse every day.