Review by Booklist Review
Psychiatrist Dr. Caroline Strange thinks of her patients mostly with disdain as she listens to them bemoan their lives as upper-class New Yorkers. Caroline went through a horrible trauma as a child and experiences intensely dark and disturbing thoughts; however, flashbacks to her childhood leave the reader questioning which came first, the darkness or the trauma? When a troubled man arrives in her office contemplating murder, Caroline is disturbed, but her interest is piqued. Does this potential patient share the same darkness that lurks inside her? After a local woman goes missing, Caroline becomes a suspect, and with no one believing her, the reader is unsure who is the predator, who is the prey, and most of all, who is Caroline? This is a fast-paced novel told through multiple character viewpoints with flashbacks between the present and Caroline's childhood. The storytelling varies, with some voices sharp and caustic while other narrations are slower and somewhat lacking suspense. But overall, Luna's latest (after Hideout, 2022) carries the traits, trappings, and twists of a solid psychological thriller.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The NYPD suspects a psychiatrist of abducting a journalist who publicly denigrated her in the cunning latest from Luna (the Alice Vega series). Ellen Garcia, a staff writer at Brooklyn Bound magazine, has been missing for three days when new patient Nelson Schack tells Dr. Caroline Strange he's thinking of killing someone she knows. Nelson's admission isn't specific enough to warrant a breach of doctor-patient confidentiality to inform the police--but then two detectives come knocking on Caroline's door. Two months earlier, Ellen included Caroline on a list of the worst doctors in Brooklyn; in turn, Caroline sent a letter to the editor of Brooklyn Bound, evincing a grudge against the reporter that now resembles a motive. To exonerate herself, Caroline sells out Nelson to the police and launches her own inquiry into Ellen's disappearance. Luna relays the bulk of the tale in Caroline's snarky first-person, present-tense narration ("This is the moment, if I were the star of my own reality show, when I'd cast my eyes above the camera at the producer and mouth, Get me the fuck out of here"), which successfully distracts from the plot's preponderance of coincidences. Chapters that check in on Ellen, who's been taken captive, and flash back to Caroline's childhood, casting doubt on her candor, ramp up the tension. Lisa Gardner fans, take note. Agent: Mark Falkin, Falkin Literary. (June)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Seriously creepy cat-and-mice games ensue when a sharp-thinking therapist tries to track down a patient who may also be a kidnapper. Caroline Strange is a therapist with a hot husband, a fabulous Brooklyn brownstone ("My patients are primarily from the privileged masses: Prospect Park soccer moms and aging hipster dads, anxious gainfully employed millennials and their oddly relaxed unemployed counterparts"), and two sons. She sports Alexander McQueen suits and $175 hairstyles, is exacting in her thought process, and thinks highly of herself. Strikingly distant whenever she mentions her own offspring, Dr. Caroline has apt-if-unkind nicknames for her patients: Deluded Delia, Jacked-Up James, Copycat Caroline ("doomed to be so called just because we share a name"), Bilious Byron, Churlish Charlotte, Amanda Demanda; she also has her own traumatic history that heralds potential emotional baggage. When a new client meets with Dr. Caroline and tells her that he's going to kill someone, adding, "I know who you really are," Caroline jumps into action. Even after the police get involved, Caroline is convinced that she can do better than them--a young woman has gone missing, and she, Dr. Caroline, is the one who can find her by tracking down this possibly deranged new patient. As the tension-filled story unfolds, we are privy not just to Caroline's perspective, but also to those of Ellen Garcia, the missing woman, and Gordon Strong, an erstwhile neighbor of Caroline's from her childhood home in Wisconsin. A few notches grislier than your garden-variety thriller-with-multiple-twists, this novel alleviates some of that gore by being chock-full of cleverly leveraged cultural references, from the Beastie Boys and Billy Ray Cyrus to Red Rover (yes, the children's game), Sybil, The Silence of the Lambs, Saw, and Clueless. A super-focused therapist drives the unrelenting tension in this page-turning, twisted thriller. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
