I recently finished another book by my new favorite suspenseful writer: Always Watching by Chevy Stevens. The main character in this book has appeared in previous books by Stevens as the therapist for the main characters in those books. I liked the idea of giving a story to a minor character and learning more about her!
“In the lockdown ward of a psychiatric hospital, Dr. Nadine Lavoie is in her element. She has the tools to help people, and she has the desire―healing broken families is what she lives for. But Nadine doesn’t want to look too closely at her own past because there are whole chunks of her life that are black holes. It takes all her willpower to tamp down her recurrent claustrophobia, and her daughter, Lisa, is a runaway who has been on the streets for seven years. When a distraught woman, Heather Simeon, is brought into the Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit after a suicide attempt, Nadine gently coaxes her story out of her―and learns of some troubling parallels with her own life. Digging deeper, Nadine is forced to confront her traumatic childhood, and the damage that began when she and her brother were brought by their mother to a remote commune on Vancouver Island. What happened to Nadine? Why was their family destroyed? And why does the name Aaron Quinn, the group’s leader, bring complex feelings of terror to Nadine even today? And then, the unthinkable happens, and Nadine realizes that danger is closer to home than she ever imagined. She has no choice but to face what terrifies her the most…and fight back.”
Some of the situations in the book were a little too coincidental, but at the same time, I like coincidences! I find them entertaining, most of the time. I found myself suspecting all of the characters that Nadine interacted with, but I was unable to guess what was going to happen in the book. While it seems that people liked this book less than Stevens’ other books, I found it just as entertaining. Hopefully she still has a few more books for me to read!
What have you been reading lately?