Death In Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh
Death In Her Hands opens with a very interesting premise. A 72-year-old widow, Vesta Gul, is walking her dog in the woods near her isolated cabin in the woods when she finds a note. Her name was Magda , it says. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body. I think it's reasonable to assume that most people would have imagined the note was a joke or, at least as a purely precautionary measure, told the police. Vesta, though, is not most people: like many of Moshfegh's protagonists, she's a lonely outsider whose thought processes and social skills are unsettlingly off-kilter. Not only does Vesta decide she will solve this murder mystery herself, but she goes about it in a deeply peculiar way. Rather than looking for clues, beyond some cursory searches for information using Ask Jeeves on a library computer, Vesta simply decides on Magda's story for herself. This is by turns amusing and disturbing. It's fairly clear that there's so
