QUIET DELL by Jayne Anne Phillips

Don’t let the peaceful-sounding title fool you.  This novel revolves around the real-life serial killer, Herman Drenth, aka Harry Powers, aka Cornelius Pierson, who preyed upon lonely women during the Great Depression.  He was finally caught in West Virginia after murdering Asta Eicher and her three children.  The book opens with the widowed Asta living in her deceased mother-in-law’s home.  She is financially desperate and allows herself to be conned by Drenth via a correspondence in which he promises to marry her.  This first section is a bit slow-moving, but, while Asta is excited about her new life, the reader experiences a sense of dread that is fully realized soon enough.  Enter Emily Thornhill, a fictional reporter for the Chicago Tribune, who becomes very attached to the Eicher children in absentia and provides a welcome breath of fresh air against the gruesome backdrop of the murders.  Like In Cold Blood, to which this novel has been compared, the murders are a fait accompli, and Emily serves as a conduit to the killer’s backstory and the buildup to his trial.  The author may go a little too far in counter-balancing the brutal murders with Emily’s many successes and good fortune, but I found her pluck and perseverance to be refreshing, though certainly no one could mistake her almost fairy-tale life as fact.  The author artfully manages to keep the reader’s eyes glued to the pages, not only with Drenth’s history and the lynch mob that forces his removal to a more secure prison, but with the assorted lovable and good-hearted characters that surround Emily, including her gay photographer, a street urchin that she befriends, and the Eicher’s dog Duty.  Certainly, this blend of good and evil is intentional on the author’s part, and I think it works extremely well.