From almost the first page, Sarah Pekkanen’s “The Women in White” is both compelling and gripping. From the start we feel connected to the main character Riley. Her first person narrative in the present grounds us as we read some chapters narrated in third person about the four other women who are also at the center of this fascinating story about research into psychic abilities.

Pekkanen’s talents for flawlessly juxtaposing the different narrations and juggling the different time periods make the story flow perfectly as we are riveted by what is happening to the women and by their abilities. In 1964, Betty, Kathleen, Ivy, and Helen were recruited to work with the fictional Dr. Trimble in his laboratory. Each woman has a different reason for participating, and each woman’s life will be irrevocably changed by the experience.

In the present, we meet Riley as she interviews for a job with a reclusive woman named Betty Sadler, who uses a wheelchair and lives in a home that seems to have been perfectly preserved in the 1960s. There’s no internet, no modern furniture, no microwave, no television. There’s nothing to show that sixty years have passed since Betty first moved into the house. Riley is coming out of a terrible divorce caused by her husband’s gambling addiction. She still feels she loves him but also knows that she can’t stay with him. His problems and the divorce have left her penniless. She’s living out of her car and is, of course, terrifically relieved when Betty offers her the job.

Riley isn’t sure why Betty needs her, because Betty seems very capable, very sharp, and very able to cook and take care of herself. But they form a friendship, and slowly Riley learns that Betty has no one. When Betty asks her to go back to the college Betty attended to see if Riley can locate any of the three women who were her best friends at that time, things change. At the college, Riley finds that records have been hidden, and there is nothing to indicate that the other three women existed. Riley senses that things are not right, although she is not accustomed to trusting her sixth sense about such things.

There are several mysteries to be solved; the very first is why Betty hired Riley when there were many more qualified people interested in the job. There’s also the question of what happened to Betty’s best friends, the women who worked with her at Dr. Trimble’s lab day and night. Why have records disappeared recently, and who might be behind that? And the question that is the most dangerous is whether someone has resurrected the experiments and for what purpose.

Through the third person narratives, we learn a lot about the other women, their strengths and their insecurities. Each woman was personally chosen for the lab work by Dr. Trimble, except for Betty. And all of them, including Betty, have psychic experiences from their past that they were told by friends or family members to forget or ignore or bury. Things happened to them which couldn’t be explained and which might make people look at them differently.

Betty was married to Douglas, who worked in Dr. Trimble’s lab. She was very happy in her marriage and looked forward to the time when they would have children. In the meantime, like Ivy and Kathleen, she took care to be the perfect wife, 1960s-style, having dinner ready and a cocktail made for her husband when he arrived home from work. Dressing nicely for dinner and keeping the house clean. Attending her classes at the college. Those were the duties of a good wife in 1964. Helen was the only one of the four who was not married, and she had a secret that she didn’t share with the others.

Pekannen shows Trimble’s increasing fanaticism as he starts having the women wear the same clothing and eventually stay together in the basement of the laboratory building. His determination for complete control over the women in order to bend them to his will is frightening. And it’s believable because of how cleverly Pekannen has created context for the four women to want to comply with Trimble’s demands.

Betty does it because her husband works for Dr. Trimble. Ivy must participate because the only reason her husband was hired by the college to be a football coach was at Dr. Trimble’s behest because he wanted Ivy to be part of the experiments. Helen was persuaded to come after Dr. Trimble read an article about her abilities, and she was glad to leave her poor paying job to live in a dorm room with three meals a day. Kathleen does it because her husband respects it, and she thinks it’s important.

The bond between the women becomes stronger and stronger, and they feel like they are sisters. Their psychic abilities help them to understand each other, and because of that, their bonds are even more cohesive than they otherwise might have been, with Dr. Trimble controlling them like a puppet master. But when Riley finds out what happened to the other three women, and when she realizes that the secrets surrounding the psychic experiments are not just rooted in the past, she wonders what Betty’s quest might have unleashed.

And as Riley’s connection with Betty gets stronger, she wonders what this journey might reveal to her personally as well. Because while Betty and Riley each have their own individual strengths, as with the four “women in white,” there is power in numbers. Together, will Riley and Betty be powerful enough to vanquish the evil that is pursuing them?

This novel is a mystery that has it all. It’s based on a fascinating period in time, a time when women wore heels and lipstick and catered to men; a time when prestigious universities — and even the CIA — were delving into psychic phenomena; and a time when because of the lack of an information highway, it was easier to hide events that were best locked away in secret closets or in cold damp basements. These are women we really come to know and care about. And there is an evil that seems to have been lurking unseen, ready to torture more women in the name of psychic research. Pekkanen is at her best as she keeps complex timelines, an exciting plot, and admirable characters in perfect play.

This review was first posted on Bookreporter.com.