Book Review

Eight students spend the summer of 1993 emptying a Victorian house in the woods. Its owner lived there alone for sixty years and filled fifty rooms floor to ceiling, leaving two narrow crawl-channels through the rubbish. He also left a book of poetry, and the poetry is a lock.

Two girls murdered three years apart. A town that decided the case was closed when a convenient stranger was shot dead. And a grandmother whose dementia keeps producing the same six words, in a voice that is not quite hers: they say a girl died here.

The Third Estate: Devil's Tango by Debbie Berlin is a razor-sharp espionage thriller of assassins, ciphers, and lethal secrets

She is twenty-two years old and both her hands are black to the fingertips. In her country, sin does not stay private — it surfaces in the veins as a rot that climbs, then maddens, then kills. She has been killing for the Prophet for three years, and her skin has kept the receipts.

A dying serial killer agrees to be interviewed for a streaming docuseries and says, on camera, that he murdered four women in the summer of 2001. Not five. Four. In a small Washington town, two women who have not spoken in twenty-five years understand immediately what that means.