Suspense

Oxford don Emily is off to a retreat of sorts at Chalet des Anglais—a large estate in the French Alps, owned by several of the Oxford colleges. Emily is recently widowed, and this Alpine sojourn, including students and faculty—several of whom are her friends—seems to be exactly what the doctor ordered. But from the get-go, something isn’t right. Her house is burglarized as she is leaving for the airport. At the Chalet, someone rifles through her belongings and attempts to log into her laptop. Friends, too, are acting oddly, while an attractive undergrad is busy putting the moves on nearly everyone, including Emily. Not exactly a locked-room—let’s call it a locked chalet—the house is tremendously remote and, naturally, without any Internet access. Elliott slowly and skillfully builds the tension, carefully layering conversations, glances, overheard conversations, diary entries, and annual reports from the Chalet’s earlier years. When all hell finally breaks loose—and it certainly does, in multiple ways—Emily is left without anyone she can trust, forced to recreate her world

Locked-room mysteries and thrillers are booming, but this one has a twist. In the 1990s, young Grace DeRoche’s family lives in a Canadian branch of the FLDS, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Talk about a locked room. Children in the cult headed by Warren Jeffs, who in real life has only left the FBI’s Most-Wanted list because he’s serving a life sentence for child sexual assault, live with their fathers and the men’s multiple wives in Brigham, a secretive, abusive compound. They spend their days praying, in fear of outside-world apostates, are illiterate, and are subject to harsh “corrections.” Girls are married young to much older men. After the police come and “Brigham’s Ten”—Grace and nine other children—escape, the rest of the compound dies by mass suicide. In the years that follow, Grace remains in the locked room of her mind: she has dissociative identity disorder, with multiple personas taking over when she’s stressed. Stress comes in the deaths of members of the Ten, and Detective Beau Brunelli must protect Grace, a challenge when the woman doesn’t believe she needs protection and is too frightened and confused to accept help. Freedman could have made this sensationalist, but it’s a thought-provoking read, providing a look at life after a cult and portraying the survivors as real people, warts and all. The shocking ending here is a reward of its own, and getting there is a journey through incredible details of life inside Warren Jeffs’ world and inside the mind of a troubled woman. While you wait, try the Netflix documentary Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey, which covers the FLDS and is also absorbing.