On the first page of this book, an eighty-one-year-old widow serves her job applicant a cup of Earl Grey. The applicant never mentioned liking Earl Grey. The widow drinks coffee. It takes almost the whole novel to understand what that cup of tea actually was, and when I did, I went back and read the scene again with my arms prickling. Consider that my The Women in White review in miniature: this is a book that scares you with hospitality.
Riley Bell needs the live-in caretaker job because she is secretly sleeping in her car, bankrupted by an ex-husband’s gambling. Betty Sadler needs a caretaker for reasons that take much longer to surface. Betty’s house has a teal refrigerator, a rotary phone, one door key, and windows that have been locked for decades; a neighbor of twenty-five years tells Riley she has never once seen another soul go inside. And in 1964, in alternating chapters, young Betty and three friends put on identical white dresses and walk into a university parapsychology laboratory run by a man who smells of burnt vanilla pipe smoke and calls them his girls.
The House Where It Is Still 1964
Pekkanen’s smartest move is making the present tense feel haunted by furniture. Betty’s home is not decorated in midcentury style; it is midcentury, preserved like a fly in amber, and the slow revelation of why lands harder than any jump scare. I have read plenty of thrillers about locked rooms. I have read far fewer where the locked room is sixty years wide.
Riley earned my loyalty faster than most thriller narrators do. She is ashamed of the car she sleeps in, keeps score against a pair of overachieving siblings, and second-guesses her own gut so reflexively that watching her learn to stop becomes the book’s second plot. And the caretaking runs both ways: it is Betty who pours the five o’clock old-fashioneds, Betty who sweetens Riley’s glass with maraschino juice and calls it her old trick. Half the book’s warmth lives in that reversal, an employer quietly mothering the woman hired to look after her.
The 1964 chapters are their own pleasure and their own trap. The period detail is thick and loving, cocktail shakers, stewardess weigh-ins, beauty columns, and all of it doubles as the mechanism of the crime, because a world that files a woman under her husband’s name is a world that can delete her without leaving a seam. When Riley’s internet searches for the four women come up empty, the reason is not supernatural at all, and that is the point.
Girl Four
The laboratory scenes are where my skin stayed cold. Dr. Trimble’s experiments escalate from card-guessing games to something that reads like a cult with clipboards, and Pekkanen builds it all from real history: her author’s note describes researching the actual Duke parapsychology archives, every epigraph before Betty’s chapters is a citation you can check, and the government’s real Stargate remote-viewing program hovers behind the fiction like a watermark. Somewhere in his notebook, Trimble reduces Betty to a circled numeral. The moment she glimpses it, the book’s title stops being a costume note and becomes an accusation. The four identical dresses, sewn overnight by the doctor’s exhausted, wordless wife, arrive like uniforms for an order nobody joined on purpose; the women answer them with a protection pact sealed over a sad diner lunch, and that small vow carries more menace and more tenderness than any single twist in the book.
What I admired most is the restraint. There is almost no violence on the page. The horror is a schedule, a uniform, a locked basement, a man taking careful notes while a woman suffers. By the halfway mark I was reading the warm scenes with dread, because the structure has already promised you that something ended these four friendships in a single day, and the book makes you wait for it the way you wait for a diagnosis.
What the Book Believes
Every psychic thriller eventually has to answer its own question: is any of this real? In The Women in White, Pekkanen answers with more grace than most. The 1964 chapters play the gifts as genuine; the present-day chapters keep offering you rational exits, coincidence, cold reading, a tired mind connecting dots. The ending chooses a side, I think, but it chooses with a wink, and it leaves the skeptic’s door unlocked on the way out. I finished the book unsure whether I had read a ghostless ghost story or a very patient tragedy about suggestible, exhausted women, and I mean that as high praise. Books that let you keep your own answer are rarer than they should be.
Where It Falters
I wish the ending trusted its quiet as much as the rest does. After thirty chapters of accumulating hush, the final confrontation arrives with a villain who explains too much, a motive I had met in a dozen other thrillers, and one scheme that would not survive a raised eyebrow. None of it breaks the book, the pages still turn themselves, but the last act is the only stretch where I could feel the genre’s gears instead of the story’s pulse. The early backstory chapters also idle a little, lovely as they are, and readers who want their thrillers to end on a knife edge should know this one ends on something closer to a long exhale.
If You Want More of This Feeling
The Women in White review would be incomplete without a shelf of follow-ups, so here are four:
- The Locked Ward by Sarah Pekkanen. Her previous solo book, and proof the institutional dread here was no accident.
- The Unknown by Riley Sager. Another cold case that refuses to stay archived, with a lakebound chill.
- House of Splinters by Laura Purcell. For readers who liked not knowing whether the haunting was real.
- The Housemaid Is Watching by Freida McFadden. Suburban surfaces, wrongness underneath, pages that vanish.
Reviewing The Women in White: Where It Leaves You
The Women in White by Sarah Pekkanen is the quietest scary book I have read all year, and the one I keep pressing on people who claim they are tired of thrillers. It stumbles where nearly all of them stumble, in the explaining, but it gets something almost none of them attempt: a mystery where the crime is erasure, the weapon is paperwork, and the final act of detection is simply saying four women’s names out loud. Drink the tea. Ask who made it, and how they knew. Then check on the quietest woman you know.