The Singing Bone
A Novel
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- £11.99
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
A convicted killer’s imminent parole forces a woman to confront the nightmarish past she’s spent twenty years escaping.
I found you. That’s what Mr. Wyck told her: I found you.
1979: Seventeen-year-old Alice Pearson can’t wait to graduate from high school so she can escape the small town in upstate New York where she grew up. In the meantime, she and her friends avoid their dysfunctional families while getting high in the woods. There they meet the enigmatic Jack Wyck, who lives in the rambling old farmhouse across the reservoir. Enticed by his quasi-mystical philosophy and the promise of a constant party, Alice and her friends join Mr. Wyck’s small group of devoted followers. But their heady, freewheeling idyll takes an increasingly sinister turn, as Alice finds herself crossing moral and emotional boundaries that erode her hold on reality. When Mr. Wyck’s grand scheme goes wrong, culminating in a night of horrific violence, Alice is barely able to find her way back to sanity.
Twenty years later, Alice Wood has created a quiet life for herself as a professor of folklore, but an acclaimed filmmaker threatens to expose her past with a documentary about Jack Wyck’s crimes and the cult-like following he continues to attract from his prison cell. Wyck has never forgiven Alice for testifying against him, and as he plots to overturn his conviction and regain his freedom, she is forced to confront the truth about what happened to her in the farmhouse—and her complicity in the evil around her.
The Singing Bone is a spellbinding examination of guilt, innocence, and the fallibility of memory, a richly imagined novel that heralds the arrival of a remarkable new voice in literary suspense.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the tantalizing opening, set in 1999, of Hahn's carefully crafted first novel, documentary filmmaker Hans Loomis steels himself to open a package, covered with drawings of snakes, birds, skulls, and flowers, from Jack Wyck, a convicted felon. That Hans has asked Wyck about something that happened two decades earlier is a sign to Wyck that he'll soon be out of prison. A flashback to upstate New York in 1979 introduces 17-year-old Alice Pearson, a high school student who, with three friends, becomes involved with the mysterious Wyck, who lives in an isolated farmhouse. Twenty years later, Alice, now a folklore professor, is researching ballads about a murdered girl's body transformed into a musical instrument that's able to identify her killer. After Hans contacts Alice about his film about Wyck, she's chilled to learn that Wyck has fans who have created a website featuring images from his past crimes. Well-wrought leads enhance the effective, gradual reveal of exactly what put Wyck behind bars.
