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Ottessa Moshfegh, author of Death in Her Hands

While on her daily walk with her dog in a secluded woods, a woman comes across a note, handwritten and carefully pinned to the ground by stones. "Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body." But there is no dead body. With very little to go on, our narrator invents a list of murder suspects and possible motives for the crime. Oddly, her suppositions begin to find correspondences in the real world, and the fog of mystery starts to fade into menacing certainty. As her investigation widens, strange dissonances accrue, perhaps associated with the darkness in her own past. We must face the prospect that there is either an innocent explanation for all this or a much more sinister one.

Week of June 21, 2021

Paperback releases for the week of June 21st include A PRIVATE CATHEDRAL, James Lee Burke's 40th book and his 23rd featuring Detective Dave Robicheaux, who must battle the most terrifying adversary he has ever encountered --- a time-traveling superhuman assassin; LOVE YOUR LIFE by Sophie Kinsella, an utterly delightful novel about a woman who ditches her dating app for a writer’s retreat in Italy, only to find that real love comes with its own filters; GHOSTS OF HARVARD, Francesca Serritella's much-talked-about first novel about a Harvard freshman who becomes obsessed with her schizophrenic brother’s suicide --- then she starts hearing voices; WHAT’S LEFT OF ME IS YOURS, Stephanie Scott's gripping debut set in modern-day Tokyo that charts a young woman's search for the truth about her mother's life...and her murder; and BRONTË’S MISTRESS, newcomer Finola Austin's dazzling work of fiction that revolves around the scandalous love affair between Lydia Robinson and Branwell Brontë, brother to novelists Charlotte, Emily and Anne.