Part of Joseph O'Loughlin
First published 2008
Joe O'Loughlin has talked people back from the edge before. This time he fails. A naked woman stands on a bridge above a flooded gorge, high heels on, crying into a phone. Joe tries to reach her. She turns, says "You don't understand," and drops. The suicide breaks something in him. Then the woman's teenage daughter comes to find him with a single, stubborn fact: her mother was terrified of heights. She would never have died that way. Someone put her there. Joe starts pulling at the thread. Who was on the other end of that phone call? What did they say? What kind of person can reach inside someone's mind and steer them toward death? Joe has spent his career as a clinical psychologist rebuilding people whose thinking has fractured. Now he is up against a man who does the opposite. This adversary finds the weak points in a person's psychology and works them open, methodically, until nothing whole remains. The closer Joe gets, the clearer it becomes that knowing how a mind breaks is not the same as being immune to it.
Genres: suspense, mystery, crime, adult-fiction, thriller, psychological-thriller
Vibes: dark, gripping, intense, psychological, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: cat-and-mouse, obsessive-investigation, unreliable-narrator
Setting: gorge
352 pages · Hardcover · Sphere
Content warnings: death, mental-illness, suicidal-ideation, suicide