'The Promise of a Lie'
By: Howard Roughan
(Hardcover / 336 Pages / Warner Books / ISBN: 0446529435 / $23.95)
Description: Howard Roughan’s debut, 'The Up and Comer', was hailed as one of the most hip and entertaining thrillers of the year. Now Roughan returns at full stride with a scintillating novel of deception that begins when a gifted young psychologist becomes entangled in the life of a beautiful and calculating patient.
Verdict: Dr. David Remler is a published psychologist who practices in Manhatten. He has quite a cast of characters for patients including a cellist who has a strange sexual obsession. David has published a book entitled "The Human Pendulum" that has modest sales until he is called on to testify at a trial against a rabbi accused of murder which causes book sales to soar. David has a secretary (Mila Benninghoff) but he refers to her as Mamka - a Czech name for mother. Mamka lets David know that he will be getting a new patient a person named Sam Kent. David is pleasently surprised that Sam Kent is very pretty woman not a man as he assumed. Sam comes to Dr. Remler with the problem of having the desire to kill her husband. Through the sessions and the so-called chance meetings they seem to have the good doctor starts to feel himself crossing the line of being attracted to one of his patients - though it is no wonder with him not having a relationship since his pregnant wife died in a car accident. The real problems start when David receives a phone call in the middle of the night from Sam that she has followed through on her wish and killed her husband. David rushes over in the middle of the night to her house for fear that she has tried to kill herself again and when he gets there he finds the dead husband repeatily stabbed but he cannot find Sam ... and then the fun really begins when the police show up and discover David there. Sorry, but to tell you any more would be to give a good story away!
Reviewed by Molly Bond
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