Fans of the macabre know that familiar flora and fauna have a way of turning strange mighty quickly. Consider the many iterations of “The Little Shop of Horrors” (which began as a low-budget 1960 Roger Corman film), in which a plant mutates into a bloodthirsty predator. Or recall Daphne du Maurier’s 1952 short story (and, of course, the 1963 Hitchcock film) “The Birds,” in which avians morph into winged assassins. It wouldn’t be quite accurate to say that lavender becomes lethal in Lori Roy’s latest thriller, “Let Me Die in His Footsteps”; however, foul deeds always seem to take place in the vicinity of those fragrant and festering purple blossoms.
Set in Kentucky, “Let Me Die in His Footsteps” is a Southern Gothic story whose two main storylines are tied together by lavender. The first narrative takes place in 1952 and features a girl named Annie Holleran. Like some of her other female relatives, Annie is gifted with “the know-how.” She can sense when something is about to happen or somebody is about to appear. When the novel opens, her paranormal antennae are going haywire. Her grandmother puts it down to the fact that, at midway between 15 and 16, Annie is approaching what country folk call her “ascension”: “All kinds of yearning come with a girl’s ascension — so says (Annie’s) Grandma — beautiful, glorious yearning that will twist up a girl’s insides, wring them this way and that.”
It turns out, however, that Annie’s insides are about to be twisted by terror rather than hormones. On the midnight of her “ascension,” Annie follows local custom and tiptoes out of her house (with her pesky younger sister trailing behind). The girls stumble through the pitch dark to a nearby well where, according to legend, Annie will see her future husband’s face floating in the water. Instead, when the girls approach the well at the old Baine place, they smell a foul odor wafting through the omnipresent lavender scent. Annie peers into the well and sees only blackness in the water far below. As she turns to leave, she spots the source of the bad smell: the corpse of a freshly murdered member of the Baine family.
It was reckless of Annie to trespass on the Baine property because the Baines and the Hollerans have been feuding since 1936. That was the year that Joseph Carl, the nicest of Mrs. Baine’s seven sons, was hanged for a ghastly crime on the say-so of Annie’s wild Aunt Juna.
Although the pacing of “Let Me Die” is drowsy and its steady infusions of folk wisdom (especially about ripening young females) grow somewhat stale, Roy excels in depicting the menace lurking in the natural world. (She won an Edgar Award for her first thriller, “Bent Road.”)
Roy’s lavender stalks may not be homicidal, like the plant Audrey II in “Little Shop of Horrors,” but it’s a safe bet that her readers will keep their distance from potpourri in the powder room for a long time after finishing this novel.
FICTION: THIRLLER
Let Me Die in His Footsteps
by Lori Roy (Dutton)
