The Patient Hours

She went to her doctor for help carrying less.

They used her to carry something else entirely.

Chicago. A locked office on the fourteenth floor of a North
Michigan Avenue clinic. A psychiatrist found dead in his chair
at three in the morning, a half-drunk cup of chamomile tea on
the table beside him. The medical examiner rules it a cardiac
event. Clean. Plausible. Final.

Sylvia Vance doesn't believe it. She hires Mara Voss.

Mara is a former FBI forensic psychologist who left the Bureau
three years ago under circumstances she hasn't fully explained -
not to anyone else, and not entirely to herself. She works
Chicago now as an unlicensed private investigator, building
cases the way she always has: from the outside in, the
documentary record first, the human cost alongside it.

What she finds in the clinic files doesn't look like a murder.
It looks like a research program. Six patients. Evening sessions
off the record. A supplement protocol that does more than reduce
inflammation. And a recurring gap in each patient's memory -
always a Tuesday, always the same window of hours - that every
one of them has filed under the treatment working.

The treatment was working. Just not the way they thought.

As Mara moves through the lives of six Chicagoans who have
been used - without their knowledge, without their consent - as
instruments of a federal program designed to protect a
thirty-one-million-dollar procurement fraud, she begins to
understand the full shape of what she is dealing with. The
program is more sophisticated than any of its subjects know.
The people behind it have significant resources and a
demonstrated willingness to use them. And one of the six - the
one the program was most carefully built around - is still
carrying something she cannot access, cannot name, and cannot
yet resist.

The trigger is a phrase. The phrase is three words.

The Patient Hours is a psychological thriller about
institutional betrayal, cognitive manipulation, and what it
costs to hold a door closed from the inside. It is about the
people who came for help and were used. The people who tried
to fix what they had built and ran out of time. And the
investigator who builds the case that has been waiting -
patient, precise, and inevitable - for someone to carry it.

Perfect for fans of Tana French, S.J. Watson,
and A.J. Finn.

―――

The Mara Voss Files

Book 1: The Patient Hours - Available Now

Book 2: What the Silence Keeps - Coming Soon

Book 3: Every Version of You - Coming Soon