The Patient Hours: A Mara Voss Novel

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

Pages: 279, Paperback, Independently published