THE BUTCHER AND THE LIAR

In Woeppel’s psychological thriller, a serial killer’s daughter confronts her past and the continuing repercussions of her father’s chilling crimes.

In 2015, 35-year-old Daisy Bellon returns to Hellene, Nebraska, for the first time since she was 17. She’s drawn back to town by the closure of the local cattle market, after learning about it from a mysterious newspaper clipping sent to her Chicago butcher shop. The narrative alternates between 2015 and the late 1980s, when 9-year-old Daisy first spied her father dismembering a woman named Marina in the basement of their home. Daisy tries to ignore what she saw, enjoying herself while playing with a sweet neighbor named Caleb. However, wherever she goes, the apparent ghost of Marina follows her and talks with her. Daisy’s father’s horrifying acts continue, and he even makes his child his accomplice. The lasting effects of this trauma are evident in 2015 as Daisy struggles with relationships and with questions of honesty. When Daisy’s neighbor is murdered, it brings attention to Daisy’s unsettling history—and how her gruesome past and troubled present are inextricably linked. Woeppel’s prose is strikingly atmospheric, balancing bleak Midwestern landscapes with visceral details that never feel gratuitous. Daisy’s fear of her father is effectively layered with feelings of guilt and complicity; her emotional crisis when he arrives to collect her from Caleb’s house at one point is devastating, with short, powerful sentences that punctuate the complexity of her emotions: “After everything I’d seen, everything I’d done….It felt like I was being submerged.” The novel moves briskly along, drawing readers in with scenes of the father’s crimes and Marina’s spirit early on; the 2015 timeline, sometimes tinged with dark humor, only deepens the emotional resonance. Woeppel’s narrative dances nimbly between a coming-of-age story, a ghost story, a murder mystery, and a dark exploration of trauma; somehow, she manages to make all these different tones harmonize and create something fresh, exciting, and unexpected.

A haunting, inventive, and genre-blurring serial-killer tale.