ALWAYS WATCHING (CHEVY STEVENS)

MY REVIEW:
St. Martin's Press|May 6, 2014|Trade Paperback|ISBN: 978-1-250-04900-1

"She helps people put their demons to rest."

"But she has a few of her own...

In the lockdown ward of a psychiatric hospital, Dr. Nadine Lavoie is in her element. She has the tools to help people, and she has the desire-healing broken families is what she lives for. But Nadine doesn't want to look too closely at her own past because there are whole chunks of her life that are black holes. It takes all her willpower to tamp down her recurrent claustrophobia, and her daughter, Lisa, is a runaway who has been on the strets for seven years.

When a distraught woman, Heather Simeon, is brought into the Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit after a suicide attempt, Nadine gently coaxes her story out of her-and learns of some troubling parallels with her own life. Digging deeper, Nadine is forced to confront her traumatic childhood, and the damage that began when she and her brother were brought by their mother to a remote commune on Vancouver Island. What happened to Nadine? Why was their family destroyed? And why does the name Aaron Quinn, the group's leader, bring complex feelings of terror to Nadine even today?

And then, the unthinkable happens, and Nadine realizes that danger is closer to home than she ever imagined. She has no choice but to face what terrifies her the most...and fight back.

What a page-turner this one was! My heart was just pounding as the tension continued to build and build. It was like waiting for the damn to burst! And, burst it did!! I didn't expect a lot of the occurences and didn't see them coming, that's for sure. This was the first Chevy Stevens novel I've read and I'll be reading a second one either this week or next. Very good book.