First published 1998
Ashley Patterson works a quiet tech job in Cupertino, California, and keeps mostly to herself. Then men around her start turning up dead, mutilated in a specific and disturbing pattern. The evidence keeps pointing back to Ashley, but Ashley has no memory of any of it. Two other women, Toni Prescott and Alette Peters, seem connected to the crimes, and the question of how all three women share one body drives the investigation forward. Her attorney, David Singer, takes on her defense and has to reckon with a diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder that could either save Ashley or condemn her. The courtroom becomes the place where medical science, criminal law, and the buried trauma of Ashley's past all collide. Sheldon moves the story fast, cutting between the women's separate lives and the bodies accumulating around them. The emotional core is simple and brutal: a woman who cannot trust her own mind is the only witness to crimes she may have committed.
Genres: mystery, crime, adult, adult-fiction, thriller, psychological-thriller
Vibes: dark, disturbing, fast-paced, psychological, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: fragmented-perspective, legal-defense, mystery-investigation, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Cupertino, California
Period: 21st-century, contemporary
341 pages · Paperback · Harper Collins
Content warnings: mental-illness, murder, violence