The Women in White
A Novel
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The next thriller from #1 bestselling author Sarah Pekkanen combines a decades-old mystery with spine-tingling paranormal elements in this twisty novel of the seen and unseen.
Extrasensory perception.
The Gift.
A Sixth Sense.
Or something else….
In 1964, four remarkable young women at a prestigious university became the subjects of parapsychology experiments by a visionary scientist. On the cusp of a historic breakthrough, the women mysteriously vanished and the program was erased from history.
Decades later, Riley Bell, newly divorced and desperate for a fresh start, accepts a caretaker job for an elderly widow named Betty. Riley steps into a home that is frozen in another era - no microwave, television, or cell phones, and Betty has never heard of the internet.
Why has Betty lived in such profound isolation for so many years, and why does she need Riley now? As the story unfolds across two timelines - Betty’s 1960s era of 5 o’clock martinis and high-stakes experiments, and Riley’s quest to uncover the truth about the missing women - old secrets rise to the surface. And the only way to survive is to confront the mystery that has lingered for sixty years.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This emotionally devastating thriller inspired by ESP experiments conducted at Duke University involves the shattering of four lives—and possibly also your ideas about 1960s femininity. Riley Bell, desperate to begin a new life after her ex-husband’s gambling debts destroyed her old one, takes on a position as a nursing aide to Betty Sadler, an elderly lady in a wheelchair who never leaves the house. In 1964, Betty was one of four young women with psychic abilities subjected to exhaustive, almost sadistic testing by ambitious researcher Dr. Silas Trimble. What happened to those other three women? Betty wants Riley to find out. Unfortunately, they’re not the only ones interested in those old experiments. It’s uncomfortable to witness just how much Betty and her fellow subjects allowed themselves to be dominated by the men in their lives because their social conditioning didn’t allow them to protest. By the time the mystery reaches its devastating conclusion, The Women in White has become a haunting portrait of power, complicity, and survival.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This enticing if uneven dual-timeline thriller from Pekkanen (The Locked Ward) sees a nurse's aide help a reclusive octogenarian uncover the dark truth about the 1960s-era psychological experiments she participated in. In 1964, Marquis University undergraduate Betty Sadler takes part in a study run by professor Silas Trimble, her husband's doctoral adviser. After testing reveals Betty and three other young women to have strong psychic abilities, Dr. Trimble subjects them to increasingly twisted and intrusive experiments. Decades later, penniless divorcée Riley Bell takes a live-in position caring for Betty, now a widowed paraplegic who hasn't left her house in years. When Riley agrees to assist Betty in locating her fellow test subjects, it plunges them both into a tragic and still-unfolding mystery. Pekkanen intercuts Riley's first-person narration with harrowing third-person chapters following Betty and the other test subjects in the '60s. Though the contemporary plot is marred by cartoonish villains and an underdeveloped heroine, the historical storyline rivets with its nuanced characters and graceful explorations of gender inequality, medical ethics, and mental health. It adds up to a diverting-enough suspense tale.
