It’s dark at 5 p.m. now that we’re done with daylight saving, so it’s a good time to read two novels by Minnesotans that feature ghosts, one who won’t stop talking and one who is fading away. These are so worthy of your TBA pile.
(Book Fluent)
“The Butcher and the Liar”: by S.L. Woeppel (Books Fluent, $21.99)
Marina would often ask me why she had to die. She never expected me to have an answer. She just liked to talk. But I probably should have told her right away, right after it happened. It would have explained why it was me she was forced to stay with — another question she often asked… she still didn’t know I washed her blood from a cooler in the Missouri River. — from “The Butcher and the Liar”
S.L. Woeppel (Book Fluent)
Daisy Belton is 9 when she discovers her father, a butcher and serial killer, cutting up the body of his latest victim. He isn’t surprised to see Daisy and makes her his accomplice by “going fishing” to flush the woman’s remains into the river. Her name is Marina and her spirit will be with Daisy for years, a reminder that Daisy has kept her father’s secret and her part in the crime.
This genre-jumping, involving novel is part magical realism, part psychological thriller, part romance and part coming-of-age for a girl who has seen too much. Like her father, adult Daisy is both a butcher and a liar.
The story begins in 2015 when 35-year-old Daisy returns to her hometown of Hellene, Neb., to watch the last auction at a cattle market where she and her friend Caleb Garcia spent hours as kids sitting on the catwalk and listening to the auctioneer. The narrative moves between Daisy’s childhood and 2015 when she owns her own butcher shop in partnership with Miles, who is like a brother to her.
In the childhood chapters, Daisy has a cold relationship with her father after she learns his secrets, but she lets him show her how to be a butcher. Somehow, Woeppel makes these scenes almost lyrical as Daisy is shown how to use the knives and put on chainmail gloves so she doesn’t cut herself while stripping meat from the bones.
In the chapters of Daisy as an adult, she is still having conversations with the dead Marina, who is sometimes Daisy’s conscience, sometimes her adviser on relationships. Daisy’s efforts to find Marina’s family in Croatia are touching and successful.
A constant presence is Caleb, even after he and Daisy haven’t seen one another for years. He knows she has a secret about why she never is in a committed relationship but doesn’t press for details.
Although this bare outline of the novel seems grim, it is laced with humor and a tenderness for the characters, who show us how guilt and childhood trauma can shape an adult’s life.
Woeppel grew up in Nebraska a few blocks from a cattle market. Her debut novel “Flipping the Birdie,” a superhero romance, won the $5,000 BookLife fiction prize presented by BookLife and Publishers Weekly.
“The Butcher and the Liar” is an independently published novel (which we used to call self-published), and it shows how far this form of publishing has come in the past few decades. It is getting great reviews from publications such as Kirkus Reviews, which called it “haunting and inventive.”
“Come Back, I Love You (A Ghost Story)”: by Kathleen Novak (Regal House Publishing, $19.95)
Minnesota author Kathleen Novak launches her new novel “Come Back, I Love You” on Nov. 12, 2025, at Magers & Quinn, Minneapolis. (Regal House Publishing)
That’s when I notice Bo is standing where he should have been sitting and Franny Hale is hovering in the spot I just left. She is so vague this time, ill-defined and transparent. And her transparency has color, like sky after rain, a pale and golden pink. Bo is transfixed by her. — from “Come Back, I Love You”
The ghost in Kathleen Novak’s new novel is gentle and quiet, but she wants something from Floria, who has moved into a 100-year-old little cottage on an “ancient lake” that seems to be Lake Superior. The narrator, whose name is not Floria, tells us little about herself except that she was married, lived for a while in a high-ceilinged apartment, and wanted a life of quiet. She keeps the paintings on the cottage walls that she learns were done by Franny Hale, the woman who lived there almost her entire life. Later, she finds sketches hidden in a catalog of a man who visited Franny while her husband was away at war.
Floria makes friends with her elderly, lively neighbor Mavis and her dog. The women bond over their love of the lake in all its moods. Floria (a name she’s taken from the lead character in the opera “Tosca”) tells Maeve about how Franny’s pictures are sometimes tilted and there are other manifestations of her presence. Does Franny want Floria to do something? Franny appears only a few times, getting more wispy each time. She seems happy when Floria plants a garden with the help of Bo, a long-legged, smart handyman who does repairs on the cottage.
Floria’s first summer in the cottage is glorious as she and Mavis watch activity on the lake and marvel over their good luck at living in such a place. But things turn when Mavis is hospitalized and moved to a nursing facility. Floria brings her flowers and fresh berries, but it is never the same. And Bo, with whom Floria has hoped to have a relationship, leaves for a year to live in the South.
So the title of this story, told by Floria in a no-nonsense voice, could have many meanings. Who should come back? Who is loved? Is it Mavis? Bo? Franny the ghost? Floria’s big Italian family about whom she often thinks? The lake?
It’s all of them, and the interesting part is that their intertwined stories do not end. Floria continues living in her beloved cottage, waiting for the next chapter in her life on the lake. We don’t know what happens to the other characters.
Novak is a poet and Minnesota Book Award finalist for “Do Not Find Me.” Its companion is “The Autobiography of Corrine Bernard.” Her historical novel “Steel” won the Northeastern Minnesota Book Award for best fiction of 2022.
She will launch “Come Back, I Love You” at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Ave. S., Mpls.
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