November 1, 2024
Bestselling Bartz (The Last Session; The Writing Retreat) offers a locked-room thriller about social worker Thea, who learns that her new patient, a catatonic woman, is linked to Thea's traumatic past. The woman will lead Thea deeper into her own harrowing history and to a suspicious retreat center. Prepub Alert.
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April 1, 2025
A social worker with a traumatic past goes undercover to save a patient to whom she bears a strange resemblance. By day, Thea offers art therapy to patients in a New York psychiatric ward; by night, she drinks too much and obsesses about how she was groomed by her pastor as a teenager, and the impact his abuse continues to have on her life. When a catatonic patient is admitted to the ward, Thea is shocked and excited to discover that it's Catherine O'Brien, star ofStargirl, a movie that sparked a lot of her teenage fantasies, and who could almost be her twin. When Catherine is signed out from the ward by two people pretending to be her parents, Thea decides to follow a few breadcrumbs the former actor seems to have left her--most notably, a podcast recorded by people named Moon and Sol, who run something called the Center for Relational Healing in the New Mexico desert. Thea signs up for retreat at the CRH, and when she arrives, she's shocked to see Jonah, a guy with whom she'd nearly had a one-night stand back in New York. He says he's actually a private investigator hired by Catherine's family to find her. Aligned in their goal, Thea and Jonah sneak around trying to dig into Moon and Sol's secrets, while still attending the sessions meant to break open their relationship blockages and help them connect to past lives. Clearly, there's something sinister going on, and when they do find Catherine, their fears are amplified rather than assuaged. Bartz takes her novel, and its characters, to places beyond where other authors stop short; this is a harrowing story that tackles human vulnerability head-on. She shows us how evil actors can take full advantage of people in pain for their own material and psychic gain and how emotionally susceptible people can make tragic decisions. Melodrama of the first order, but frightening all the same.
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April 1, 2025
Social worker Thea is positive she recognizes the disheveled woman who appears in her psychiatric clinic. Determined to help the woman, who suffers from temporary amnesia, Thea discovers she is connected to a past trauma in Thea's own life. Before Thea can find out more, the woman is suspiciously removed from the clinic. Determined to find her patient, Thea follows a trail to New Mexico and infiltrates a retreat that guarantees romantic healing for all participants. The charismatic couple who operates the retreat seduce Thea into staying longer than necessary, and she soon finds herself trapped in delusional cult practices with no way to escape. Bartz's sophomore novel delivers a similarly propulsive pace to her first, The Writing Retreat (2023). Thea is repeatedly thrown into untenable situations, frequently caused by her trauma-informed decisions. There is a palpable sense of paranoia throughout, heightened by Thea's inner monologue and mental instability. Recommended for readers who enjoy intense psychological thrillers with unreliable narrators, such as titles by Ruth Ware, A. J. Finn, and Alex Michaelides.
COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.