Phrenology -- Fiction. |
Dressmakers -- Fiction. |
Socialites -- Fiction. |
Women prisoners -- Fiction. |
Paranormal fiction. |
Seamsters |
Available:
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Searching... Dighton Public Library | PUR | 1:DIMOD | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Hanson Public Library | PURCELL | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Mansfield Public Library | FIC PURCELL | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Norfolk Public Library | F PURCELL, L. POI | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Pembroke Public Library | FIC PURCELL, L. | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Raynham Library | FIC PURCELL, L | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Taunton Public Library | PURCELL, LAURA | 1ST FLOOR STACKS | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
"[An] uncanny Gothic mystery... Satisfying." -- New York Times Book Review
"A romping read with a deliciously dark conceit at its center... Reminded me of Alias Grace ."--Kiran Millwood Hargrave
From the author of The Silent Companions , a thrilling Victorian gothic horror story about a young seamstress who claims her needle and thread have the power to kill
Dorothea Truelove is young, wealthy, and beautiful. Ruth Butterham is young, poor, and awaiting trial for murder.
When Dorothea's charitable work brings her to Oakgate Prison, she is delighted by the chance to explore her fascination with phrenology and test her hypothesis that the shape of a person's skull can cast a light on their darkest crimes. But when she meets one of the prisoners, the teenaged seamstress Ruth, she is faced with another strange idea: that it is possible to kill with a needle and thread--because Ruth attributes her crimes to a supernatural power inherent in her stitches.
The story Ruth has to tell of her deadly creations--of bitterness and betrayal, of death and dresses--will shake Dorothea's belief in rationality, and the power of redemption. Can Ruth be trusted? Is she mad, or a murderer? For fans of Shirley Jackson, The Poison Thread is a spine-tingling, sinister read about the evil that lurks behind the facade of innocence.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Pairing unreliable narrators from vastly different social classes, Purcell (The Silent Companions) offers a chilling Victorian gothic thriller with supernatural overtones. Heiress Dorothea Truelove continually frustrates her father by spurning advances from "proper" suitors-instead, she possesses a clandestine passion for a handsome but socially unsuitable police officer and a not-so-secret fascination with phrenology, the study of the purported relationship between head shape and moral character. Dorothea's research trips to Oakgate Prison introduce her to a young servant, Ruth Butterham, who was recently imprisoned for murdering her mistress. Ruth narrates her personal history to an increasingly horrified Dorothea, revealing that this is only the most recent death of many for which she bears responsibility (with varying degrees of intent). Ruth, a talented seamstress, is convinced that her malice is transformed through her needlework into violence toward a garment's wearer, from a schoolyard bully to her own family members. Meanwhile, Dorothea (whose pseudoscience causes her to harbor secret doubts about her own moral qualities) begins to suspect parallels between Ruth's story and her own. The novel's suspenseful plot is a fittingly knotty one, even if the final strand is a bit too hastily tied off. But what elevates Purcell's novel is its inflection with issues of class, race, gender, and educational inequities, upon which much of the novel's dramatic irony relies. This smart and sophisticated historical thriller will appeal to fans of Sarah Waters's Fingersmith and Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A Victorian do-gooder meets a young seamstress, on trial for murder, who confesses to killing her employer with just a needle and thread.Wealthy heiress Dorothea Truelove devotes her charitable work to visiting the female inmates of Oakgate Prison. When she receives a note from the prison matron informing her that "we [have] another one," Dorothea is thrilled because this is her chance to prove her ideas about the science of phrenology. Convinced that a person's character, including "the propensity to kill," is mapped out on the cranium, she is eager to interview her subject, 16-year-old Ruth Butterham, who stands accused of murdering her mistress, "slowly, by degrees." With each visit, Ruth tells Dorothea the sad and brutal story of grinding poverty and devastating loss that led to her involuntary servitude and appalling abuse at the dressmaking shop of Mrs. Metyard and her daughter, Kate. A talented sewer, Ruth is convinced she has a supernatural ability to kill as she stitches her emotions into the garments she makes. Of her victims, some were accidents, she tells Dorothea, but others she hated, like Rosalind Oldacre, her tormentor from school, and the abusive Metyards. The rational Dorothea believes Ruth is lying, but the girl's phrenological profile reveals a "wonderfully retentive memory" and a tendency toward honesty. Meanwhile, Dorothea, who is secretly being courted by police constable David, must fend off her widowed father's efforts to betrothe her to Sir Thomas Biggleswade. Purcell (The Silent Companions, 2017) cleverly plays two unreliable narrators off each other here. Ruth is more compellingly drawn, but Dorothea's obsession with head bumps is downright creepy. Who is the dotty one? Unfortunately, the supporting characters are not as fully fleshed out, primarily serving as plot devices in the novel's sudden and rather clunky climax.Inspired by an 18th-century murder case involving a milliner and her daughter, Purcell's slightly flawed novel expertly threads splashes of Grand Guignol violence with dark gothic atmosphere to make for a chilling and engrossing read. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
A dark, gothic story of two women's lives entangled at Oakgate Prison. Young Ruth Butterham is serving a sentence for murder. Wealthy heiress Dorothea Truelove visits inmates as part of her charity duties with the hidden agenda of studying phrenology, the study of the skull to discern character and mental ability. The early Victorian-era mystery draws upon Dorothea's rebellion against society's expectations and Ruth's struggle with poverty and the possible power to kill with nothing but her talented sewing needle. Charged with killing her villainous employer and school bully, Ruth tells Dorothea of her extraordinary experiences as a dark cloud comes over the prison as well, while Dorothea works out complicated plans for a disagreeable marriage. Purcell alternates character narratives to question motives, reality, and truth on a bumpy ride full of violence and death. Both girls hang by a thread but neither can control the outcome.--Monica Garza Bustillo Copyright 2019 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
BE STILL, my heart. After nine long years in the wilderness, Jackson Brodie is back on the job in BIG SKY (Little, Brown, $28). Kate Atkinson's no-nonsense private detective will do whatever it takes, lawful or otherwise, to bring his idiosyncratic brand of justice to wounded crime victims. Two sisters from Poland are Brodie's kind of people. Lured from their home in Gdansk with offers of work in London, Nadja and Katya are about to be forced into the sex trade by heartless con men hiding behind the imposing but bogus facade of Anderson Price Associates, a nonexistent employment service. Hold onto that plot thread because Atkinson makes child's play of spinning multiple story lines; it will eventually tie into several more. Before Brodie can do battle with the sleazy Anderson Price outfit, he has to convince Penny Trotter that he's turned up sufficient evidence her husband is cheating on her. The detective wonders whether his client takes masochistic pleasure in the humiliation. "Or did she have an endgame that she wasn't sharing?" Excellent question; hold onto that one too, and let's move deeper into the thickets of this wondrously complicated plot. What's a mystery without a murder? Atkinson introduces that tantalizing element when Vince Ives's virago of a wife, Wendy, is beaten to death with a golf club. That brings Vince and all his golfing friends and their spouses into the story, every last one of them examined in depth with equal parts wit and compassion. When suicidal thoughts bring Vince to the edge of a cliff, he explains himself succinctly to Brodie, his rescuer: "I've lived a very little life." And when Brodie seems a bit full of himself, he's smartly reminded that "there's nothing heroic about a lone wolf. ... A lone wolf is just lonely." Atkinson is writing about major crimes and strong themes here, but it's the voices of her characters that make you clutch your heart: people like Crystal, an abused woman who prefers "quiet men with low opinions of themselves," and Bunny, a drag queen dreaming of a triumphant stage appearance. As for Barclay Jack, a variety show comic, he's singing the song of a sad but beautiful death. THERE'S actually a term in Japanese - "honkaku," meaning "authentic" or "orthodox" - for diabolical puzzle mysteries. Soji Shimada's murder in the CROOKED HOUSE (Pushkin, paper, $14.95), meticulously, if a bit stiffly, translated by Louise Heal Kawai, is one of those lockedroom head-bangers that invite - "taunt" is more like it - the reader to decipher the clues and solve a murder along with an all-seeing detective. (Reader, I tried, I really tried; but I don't use the term "head-banger" lightly.) The novel is set in a grand, if bizarrely constructed, mansion at Christmas as a blizzard rages outside. We're at the home of Kozaburo Hamamoto, a captain of industry with a macabre sense of humor. Watching his guests flail about the sloping floors of his tilted house provides constant entertainment for the lord of the manor, who collects precious dolls like the life-size puppet found in pieces outside in the snow. Who would destroy such a pretty thing, the guests wonder - just as they later wonder who would destroy one of their number. TRUST THE VICTORIANS to come up with ingenious ways to kill. In Laura Purcell's uncanny Gothic mystery, the poison thread (Penguin, paper, $16), a 13-year-old seamstress named Ruth Butterham is put on trial for plying her sewing skills to murder her mistress. Impossible, you say? How else to explain why a bride wearing a pair of Ruth's embroidered gloves weeps in despair throughout the wedding service? Or why an infant suffering from "the strangling angel," as diphtheria was then known, dies peacefully while wearing a cap fashioned by Ruth? Considering the poor girl's wretched life - she's made to sleep in the cellar and do her sewing in the attic; she's tossed down the coal chute - it seems only fair that she should have the power to channel her rage into her creations. ("My labor, my stitches, my blood.") Call it magical thinking, but it's satisfying to believe that exploited children like Ruth have found the weapons they need to survive. if you want to sample the black humor of summer resort relationships, have breakfast at the local diner of a pretty coastal town like Littleport, Me., the setting for Megan Miranda's the last house GUEST (Simon & Schuster, $26.99). Dizzying plot twists and multiple surprise endings are this author's stock in trade, but she warms them up by establishing the close friendship between Sadie Loman, of the real-estate-owning Lomans, and Avery Greer, a rebellious townie. These teenagers are inseparable - until Sadie is found dead on the beach on the night of an end-of-season party. Her death is thought to be suicide, but Avery is having none of it, and she'll turn Littleport upside down to prove it was murder. There's not enough vicious, two-faced coffee-shop camaraderie for my savage taste, but Miranda treats the girls' lopsided friendship with warmth and sensitivity, while leaving the door open on how genuine it actually was. And, oh boy, does she ever know how to write a twisty-turny ending (or two, or more). MARILYN STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.