UNSPEAKABLE THINGS

A queer young woman believes she’s found her soul mate in this thriller set in 1920s Cornwall, England.

West Penwith: Olivia Madden is a lonely, motherless 18-year-old with a penchant for traditional male dress. On the moor one day, she meets Tamsin Griggs, who is her age and as mischievous as she is beguiling; after their second encounter, Olivia acknowledges, “I would sooner die than live without her.” Olivia convinces her father, with whom she lives on a remote estate, to let the orphaned Tamsin move in and be tutored alongside Olivia by her visiting cousin, Simon, who’s also gay and understands that the women are lovers. Simon comes to have reservations about Tamsin—“I don’t trust her, Livvie,” he confides—but he affords the women entree to an exclusive house party at Ledges, where Olivia realizes that “for the first time I could recall, I wanted a life far bigger than the one I had.” The question is, of course, how far Olivia will go to achieve her dream. Readers of the acclaimed A Haunting on the Hill (2023) know that Hand is a master of gothic set dressing, and Olivia’s narration offers du Maurier-esque rewards through matchless descriptions of period attire, decor, and mores. Some passages are what Simon would call “a bit over‑egged,” and those who read novels for plot may wish for brisker storytelling in lieu of languorous party scenes capturing the era’s “bright young things giving a black eye to the notion of polite society.” But the plot gathers steam in the book’s last hundred pages, by which point corpses are piling up, and Ledges assumes some of the mystique of Rebecca’s Manderley.

A slow-to-simmer but glimmering gothic pleasure.