Bury Me Deep

Megan Abbott is one of the most quietly important writers working in American crime fiction, and Bury Me Deep is the book where I think she found her permanent voice. It is loosely based on the 1931 Winnie Ruth Judd case, the so-called "trunk murderess" of Phoenix, and Abbott treats the historical material with the seriousness it deserves.

The protagonist Marion Seeley is a young doctor's wife left alone in Phoenix while her morphine-addicted husband takes a long job in Mexico. She drifts into a friendship with two nurses, Louise and Ginny, that becomes something hotter and more desperate than friendship as the desert summer wears on. The men who circle them are all bad in slightly different ways. The violence, when it comes, feels both inevitable and shocking.

Abbott's prose here is the achievement. It is dense and lacquered and full of the kind of period detail that you can taste. The sentences keep doubling back on themselves the way obsessions do. The reading experience is like sliding into the same dream night after night and finding new corners of the room.

Five stars. A short, perfect book that does what historical fiction is supposed to do: make a real woman who got flattened into a tabloid story look like a person again.