The Evening Spider

Arsenault (The Broken Teaglass) deftly shifts among three perspectives in this exquisitely creepy blend of historical true crime and modern ghost story: the conversational confession of Frances Barnett, a young mother, to her brother from a lunatic asylum in Northampton, Mass., in 1885; Frances’s diary, full of obsession with the bloody details of a popular murder case and increasing mental instability as she tries to care for a baby alone and without support; and the increasingly fearful viewpoint of Abby Olson Bernacki, who’s living in the Barnett house in Haverton, Conn., in 2014 and fighting the demons of her own past while seeking the missing pieces in the story that Frances’s diary tells, in the hope of understanding the bruises on her baby, Lucy, and the eerie hushing sound in the nursery upstairs. Arsenualt’s gift for letting readers feel the characters’ anguish from the inside while showing their irrational strangeness from the outside makes for terror that sticks. Agent: Laura Langlie, Laura Langlie Agency. (Jan.)