The Moonflowers
The Moonflowers is a literary mystery set in Appalachian Kentucky, where a young artist commissioned to paint her grandfather's portrait begins excavating decades of family secrets through conversations with the elderly woman still institutionalized for his murder — a novel about women protecting each other across generations, and the underground histories that official memory buries.
From the review
The structural conceit at the heart of The Moonflowers is deceptively simple: Tig Costello arrives in Darren, Kentucky to paint a commemorative portrait of a grandfather she barely knew, and the only person willing to tell her the full truth about him is the woman still institutionalized for his killing. What Rose-Marie does with that setup, though, is anything but simple. The novel moves between present-day Tig and the layered testimony of Eloise Price, and the rhythm of that alternation — the slow accumulation of Eloise's account against Tig's growing unease in the present — gives the book its particular tension. This isn't a whodunit. The question was answered before the novel opened. What keeps you reading is the deeper question underneath: what drove a woman to that point, and what did the community around her choose not to see?
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