Review: 'The Ghost Women' by Jennifer Murphy
Pub. Date: 24/02/2026
Publisher: Dutton
A mysterious art academy in the woods, a deck of ancient tarot cards, a centuries-old secret
On a hot August morning in 1972, the body of Abel Montague, a student at St. Luke’s Institute of the Arts, is found hanging from a tree in the forest. An ancient Hanged Man tarot card is found in the back pocket of his pants and his body has been positioned into the exact pose illustrated on the card.
When Detective Lola Germany arrives at St. Luke’s—a former monastery that once housed a secret order of monks who carried out witch trials and executions—she believes they are dealing with a ritualistic murder. While interviewing school administrators and Abel’s classmates, Lola discovers Abel’s live-in girlfriend, Pearl, seems shaken but also might be hiding something—along with her group of friends who call themselves witches.
When more students are found dead, each body arranged like a tarot card, Lola realizes she is trapped in a web of power and ambition that spans centuries. Soon the lines between past and present, spiritual and tangible, begin to blur, and the only way to survive is to seek answers from places she never imagined.
I have deeply conflicted feelings about The Ghost Women. On the one hand, I enjoyed it, was intrigued by it, raced through it. On the other hand, it felt under-developed and misguided in some of its intentions. My enjoyment came largely from the usual places when it comes to thrillers. I like figuring out what is going on, putting the clues together, testing alibis. This pleasure is inherent to the genre for me, which is why I read it. The problem is that my issues are rooted in this novel specifically, in what it does, what it suggests. We are moving into mildly spoiler-y territory here, not explicit, but suggested, so maybe skip the rest of this paragraph. Much of the mystery and murder spree has to do with sexual abuse and assault, with the long history of female suffering wrapped up in the history of the island itself. In and of itself not a problem, as thrillers can be a good place to explore the various feelings and issues that such violence brings up. Unfortunately, The Ghost Women takes a weird turn where an arbitrary line seems to be drawn and some of the violence can be excused because "poor boy", while the rest of the violence is abhorrent and evil. I don't understand where this line came from and what Murphy wanted to do with it. It suffers from taking the "divine feminine" energy talk so far that it excuses male violence. While I don't at all want to accuse Murphy personally of rape apologia, some of the book can come across that way because there is a lacking control over the material.
Lola Germany is a detective on a small island off the coast of South Carolina (if I remember correctly) and her relatively straightforward life takes a drastic turn when she is called to the mysterious art institute St Luke's. One of its students has been found dead, posed exactly like the Hanged Man card from a Tarot deck. This is far from the last murder, but each death merely adds to the confusion, to the various layers of relationships, promises, and betrayals that hang over St. Luke. Can Lola figure it all out in time, especially to maybe help protect a group of female students who have formed their own little coven? The Ghost Women is told mostly through Lola's perspective, but we also get chapters from Pearl, the girlfriend of the first victim and part of the coven, as well as other relevant-ish characters. I did like the atmosphere that was created early on in the book with this island-setting that had a history of witchcraft and violence and with a protagonist that had a hidden, troubled past. However, certain parts of the novel drag a bit and the plot might have worked better if the whole thing had been tightened up a bit.
I mentioned my main issue with the book above, but there were other aspects that didn't wholly work for me. I will first say that Jennifer Murphy has a knack for atmosphere and imagery, though. I could picture many of the scenes perfectly and there were so many individual elements I enjoyed. The school itself was intriguing, the island was interesting, Lola could have been a really conflicted and fascinating main character, the coven of students was very promising. None of it fully comes to fruition, however. The novel's setting in the early 1970s is also intriguing but I don't feel like it makes a whole lot of sense, aside from perhaps aligning with the "student at a fancy school being artsy and weird, low-key hippies" thing. Or rather, it could have made sense if more of the reality of this time period had played more of a role. Lola has zero struggles as a female lead detective, for example, and racism felt practically absent from this novel. There is also the issue of the title to me. The island is said to be haunted by Ghost Women, the ghosts of women burned at the stake for witchcraft, which is connected to a history that has European people settling on the island in the late Middle Ages... That is not feasible, regardless of what Murphy says in the Acknowledgements. These Ghost Women pop up occasionally and I appreciate that our main female characters are meant to be their inheritors, but I still don't feel they were relevant enough to give the book its title. Overall, all of these things really come down to world-building and authorial control. There is too much going on, too many plotlines that are either not fleshed out or require so much suspension of disbelief from me that I gave up. Add to that the confused messaging on sexual assault and I was left feeling weird. It might be that for other readers these things work or are not an issue, but for me they ended up tainting much of the rest of the story.
I give this novel...
2 Universes!
I still don't know how to feel about The Ghost Women. On the surface it has a lot of things I like, but how it all came together in the end did not work for me. In the end, it is that mildly sour aftertaste that determined my rating.
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