Hannah’s Pick of the Week: The Mesmerist by Caroline Woods

“The girl’s shoulders stopped trembling at “friend.” Amazing how the word, so common and ordinary among those who practiced plain speech, could lift the spirits unfamiliar with the custom. Slowly, the girl unlaced her fingers and picked up her head. Pearl gasped. Cook had gone quiet. Abby refused to react.”

Caroline Woods, The Mesmerist, pg. 10

Minneapolis, 1894. Another wave of economic crisis has hit the United States, and The Bethany Home for Unwed Mothers is feeling the financial squeeze. Helmed by staunch Quaker Abby Mendenhall, Bethany Home is a rare breed of nonprofit, allowing the women who come for aid to not only keep their children, but supply themselves with live skills to prevent them from abject poverty. No one is turned away.

But while Abby and her fellow board members attempt to convince the flashy mayoral candidate Pratt to keep the Home afloat, a mysterious woman with dark bruises around her neck appears on their doorstep. Abby christens her Faith Johnson, as real names are seldom used in Bethany Home for the safety and comfort of the women, and rooms her with the cheerful May.

But something is off about Faith, with her selective mutism and her penchant for odd hand gestures, and soon the Home is buzzing that she is a mesmerist: a precursor of sorts to hypnotists, mesmerists can place anyone under their will with the flick of a wrist. Not only that, but she may know more than she leads on about the string of murders that have captured the Twin Cities’ Red-light district in their web.

Woods crafts a historical drama with a three-part split in perspective that doesn’t feel forced or overwrought, with the suspense boiling slowly like water in a tea kettle before it whistles out in sharp tones. You’ll be drawn into a Gilded Age city-on-the-rise, from its seedy but human underbelly to the gleaming cruelty of its upper crust. With the bodies and the intrigue piling up, this is one book you’ll want to keep reading until the end.

Based on a true story, The Mesmerist is a next great read if you enjoyed the historical serial killer thriller In the Garden of Spite by Camilla Bruce, or if you were hunting for a richly detailed Victorian setting with hard-scrabble characters similar to The Gods of Gotham by Lyndsay Faye.

Photo: © Kristine Kilroy Dunne