TELL ME WHO YOU ARE

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.