A Tightly Raveled Mind

By Diane Lawson
    Paperback: $16.95

    A psychoanalyst’s sanity unravels when several patients die and she falls for the private investigator she’s hired to help.

    Description

    Sigmund Freud would have liked Dr. Nora Goodman, a sexy forty-something psychoanalyst with her handful of neurotic patients who can’t seem to allow themselves happiness, love, or success. She’s not exactly a steady customer herself, born to a ranting bipolar Talmudic scholar and a mother with a heart as cold as a slaughterhouse on the Kansas prairie? in January. But now she has two kids and an overbearing psychiatrist husband. She hates him. She hates his insular social world. Nora wants a new life sans husband, but what she gets is something terribly different. It starts one Monday morning when her eight o’clock patient blows himself to smithereens. The following week, another patient dies. The police see the first as an accident, the second a straightforward suicide. Nora thinks her practice is being targeted by a killer. She hires private investigator Mike Ruiz, a tightly wound ex-cop who couldn’t care less for Sigmund. “Oh, Freud,” Mike says. “Isn’t he dead??” Freud is always watching while the unlikely pair struggle to an unexpected end.

    About the Creators

    Diane Lawson

    Diane Lawson was born and raised in a spectacularly tiny town in Missouri. She studied medicine at the University of Illinois School of Medicine and did her residency in psychiatry at the Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, where she also did her Psychoanalytic Training at the Institute for Psychoanalysis. she earned an MFA from Vermont College. She has two children and is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in full time private practice in San Antonio, Texas.

    Reviews

    • A cunning, elegantly written comedy of manners in the form of a murder mystery in which a psychoanalyst finds her wealthy clientele dropping. Literally. . . The police believe these deaths to be accidents or coincidences; and since Nora, being a dedicated Freudian, believes in neither, she seeks help from an ex cop–turned–private detective named Mike Ruiz, whose sneering contempt for Freud seems to be shielding his own private demons. You'd think being in a world populated by such tightly wound neurotics would get dreary or annoying, or both. But Lawson, herself a San Antonio–based psychoanalyst making her publishing debut, makes the journey a pleasant one with a witty, assured narrative style that renders both physical and emotional scenery with economical astuteness and grace. . . Remember how amazed Norman Mailer was after reading George V. Higgins' first novel that a member of "the fuzz" could write so well? Well, let it likewise be asserted of Lawson: This shrink can really throw it down.

      - Kirkus Reviews
    • "Lawson puts her professional experience as a psychoanalyst to good use in her engrossing debut, which melds an unusual mystery plot with insights into the inner world of a psychotherapist."

      - Publishers Weekly

    Paperback

  • ISBN 9781935955924
  • Publication Date Nov 18, 2014
  • Trim Size 9 × 6 in
  • Weight 0.9375 lbs
  • Page Count 306
  • Interests

  • Audience Adult
  • BISAC Category 1 FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Hard-Boiled
  • BISAC Category 2 FICTION / Psychological
  • BISAC Category 3 FICTION / Crime
  • Themes Fiction, Jewish, Mystery / Suspense
  • Reading Levels

  • Guided Reading Adult
  • Interest Level Adult
  • Reading Level Adult
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