The Daughters

Margaret (The Bequest) stumbles with this tangled mystery about a grieving archivist who researches the connection between a town’s historic witch trials and several recent deaths. Genevieve Tompkins drops out of her PhD program and moves to a tiny spa town in Upstate New York after the back-to-back deaths of her estranged father and her ex-fiancé. There, she’s hired as an archivist by the prominent Wilton family and tasked with cataloging their papers, many of which date back to the town’s founding in the 1700s and detail a series of brutal witch trials. As Genevieve settles in, a local woman vanishes, the latest in a long string of suspicious disappearances in the area. Genevieve kicks her curiosity up a notch when her friend vanishes next, and uncovers a link between the Wilton family’s pharmaceutical business and the missing women that might date all the way back to the witch trials. The truth turns out to be far darker than Genevieve initially imagined, forcing her to rethink her relationships altogether. Marred by erratic pacing and clunky dialogue, the narrative squanders its early intrigue and resolves with a series of baffling revelations that confuse rather than exhilarate. This misses the mark. Agent: Jody Kahn, Brandt & Hochman. (Mar.)