Death in Her Hands

Ottessa Moshfegh’s Death in Her Hands subverts the traditional murder mystery by using the genre’s framework to explore solipsism, the philosophical idea that only one’s own mind is sure to exist. The novel begins with a classic premise: the narrator, Vesta Gul, finds a note implying a murder. However, instead of searching for external clues, Vesta constructs the entire narrative internally, inventing the victim, the suspects, and the motive. This metafictional approach, in which a text comments on its own creation, turns the focus from solving a crime to the act of storytelling itself. Vesta acknowledges this directly, thinking, “I could write the book myself if I had the discipline” (4). By replacing objective reality with Vesta’s imagination, Moshfegh defies the conventions of classic detective fiction, such as the evidence-based methods in Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot series, where truth is an external puzzle to be solved.

Moshfegh’s novel pushes the popular “unreliable narrator” trope, seen in psychological thrillers like Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel Gone Girl, to a more radical conclusion. While Flynn’s narrators intentionally manipulate a shared reality to deceive others, Vesta’s unreliability stems from a solipsistic state in which her inner world becomes more real to her than the external one. The mystery is not a lie she tells the reader, but a story she tells herself to cope with loneliness and trauma. This reframing of the genre asks the reader to consider the narrative as a psychological case study rather than a puzzle, illuminating how people construct stories to impose meaning on a world they feel isolated from.

Moshfegh’s engagement with metafiction and solipsism also situates Death in Her Hands within a wider literary tradition of experimental mysteries. Writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Paul Auster have long used the detective genre as a vehicle for philosophical inquiry, where the act of detection exposes the instability of knowledge itself. Moshfegh extends this tradition by making Vesta’s consciousness both the investigator and the crime scene. The novel does not simply blur the line between fiction and reality but collapses it entirely. In this sense, the book functions as an anti-mystery, a narrative that denies closure and instead dramatizes the psychological costs of isolation and the compulsion to invent meaning in its absence.