From the acclaimed author of The Evening Spider and The Broken Teaglass comes this psychological thriller about the murder of a psychologist in a quiet New England town and his former patient whose unreliable thread will keep readers guessing until the shocking end.
I hear myself whispering. Not again. Not again.
Why did I ever come back here? Surely because of you. Because I thought of something I’d always meant to tell you. Because you were the only one I ever really wanted to tell it to…
Therapist Dr. Mark Fabian is dead—bludgeoned in his office.
But that doesn’t stop former patient Nadine Raines from talking to him—in her head. Why did she come back to her hometown after so many years away? Everyone here thinks she’s crazy. And she has to admit—they might have good reason to think so. She committed a shockingly violent act when she was sixteen, and has never really been able to explain that dark impulse—even to Fabian. Now that Fabian’s dead, why is she still trying?
Meanwhile, as Detective Henry Peacher investigates Fabian’s death, he discovers that shortly before he died, Fabian pulled the files of two former patients. One was of Nadine Raines, one of Henry’s former high school classmates. Henry still remembers the disturbing attack on a teacher that marked Nadine as a deeply troubled teen.
More shockingly, the other file was of Johnny Streeter, who is now serving a life sentence for a mass shooting five years ago. The shooting devastated the town and everyone—including Henry, who is uncomfortable with the “hero” status the tragedy afforded him—is ready to move on. But the appearance of his file brings up new questions. Maybe there is a decades-old connection between Nadine and Streeter. And maybe that somehow explains what Nadine is doing in Fabian’s office nearly twenty years after being his patient. Or how Fabian ended up dead two days after her return. Or why Nadine has fled town once again.
But as Nadine and Henry head toward a confrontation, both will discover that the secrets of people’s hearts are rarely simple, and—even in the hidden depths of a psychologist’s files—rarely as they appear.
[I recieved an arc from the author and @tlcbooktours for an honest review]
I was intrigued from the first page / prologue. 13 sentences that’s all that the prologue was made of and it automatically had me excited to read the book. Yet, at some point my interest faded and I can’t tell you exactly why that was.
The book consisted of two point of views. The first being Nadine, and we see through her eyes as a teen and as an adult. As a young girl she has no idea what is going on in her own mind, and she lacks the ability to cope with her fathers death and her life in general. As an adult she silently struggles and tries to work through things by talking, in her mind, to her deceased therapist.
The other point of view was of Henry Preacher, the cop investigating the therapist’s death. I really enjoyed his characters and the little we got to learn about his relationship with his daughters and his own internal struggles. I found myself more interested in his character than the actual story line about who killed the therapist and why.
Overall Emily Arsenault did a good job at weaving the facts and discoveries of the case between the pages so everything slowly comes together. I can honestly say I didn’t see the ending concluding the way it did. This is the first book I have ever read by Emily Arsenault, and I would be interested in reading her other work.
3/5🌟
OnceUpon_A_BookDream 