FURIOUS VIOLET

A true-crime writer attracts a terrifying stalker.

Ever since somebody broke into Violet “West” Shelley’s Los Angeles condo, she’s been using her latest project—a book about Utah’s “Crying Killer,” an uncaught serial rapist and murderer who’d cry for his mommy—as an excuse to hole up in a Salt Lake City hotel. After interviewing the last survivor on her list, West heads east to her Colorado hometown of Copper Mallow, where she intends to finish her manuscript while housesitting for Lawton Bellwood, the maternal uncle who raised her. After a stop for snacks en route, West finds a postcard on her windshield that reads, “HELLO MOTHER.” West is nobody’s mother, but the message still unnerves her, and she speeds off without investigating. Hours later, West gets an anonymous phone call during which a distorted voice entreats, “Mother, come home.” She reaches Copper Mallow without further incident, but then receives yet another disturbing note, prompting fears she’s being hunted by the kind of psychopath she writes about—perhaps even the Crying Killer himself. Muddying the waters is the fact that West’s mother is Juliet Bellwood, a “trailblazer of confessional and feminist poetry” who suffered from postpartum depression and died by suicide when West was an infant. Juliet’s most rabid fans despise West and Lawton for failing the literary icon and her legacy, and unfortunately for West and her lengthening suspect list, a nearby college is hosting a symposium to mark the half-century since Juliet’s death. West’s snarky yet vulnerable narration heightens tension, raises stakes, and amplifies the impact of every reveal. Excerpts from essays about Juliet’s life, death, and work dot the present-day storyline, providing context for West’s anger, anxiety, and abandonment issues and allowing Walker to contemplate the fraught concept of motherhood from both West’s and Juliet’s perspectives.

This claustrophobic, pulse-pounding tale of paranoia rivets from start to cathartic finish.