Quiet Dell

Harry Powers was a Dutch immigrant hanged in 1932 in West Virginia for a series of gruesome murders of women he met through lonely hearts clubs. Phillips’s fictionalisation of this real crime is well researched, gripping and a vivid re-creation of the time and place, but it is undermined by her invention of a wholly implausible journalist who gets unnecessarily personally involved. Another false note is her poetic flights of fancy. Flawed but fascinating.