RAINY DAY EXCERPTS: “THEY ALL FALL DOWN”

Welcome to another Tuesday celebrating bookish events, First Chapter/Intros, originally hosted by Bibliophile by the Sea and now hosted by I’d Rather Be at the Beach; and Teaser Tuesdays hosted by The Purple Booker.

Today’s feature is a recent download:  They All Fall Down, by Tammy Cohen. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest meets Orange is the New Black in this new psychological thriller, where a new patient suspects that women at her high-risk psychiatric clinic are being stalked by a serial killer . . .

 

 

 

Intro:  (Hannah)

Charlie cut her wrists last week with a shard of caramelized sugar.

We’d made the sugar sheets together in the clinic’s kitchen earlier in the day, under Joni’s beady-eyed supervision.

‘Yours are thick enough to do yourself an injury,’ I’d said to Charlie, as a joke.

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Teaser Tuesday:  It had been such a relief when Hannah announced they were giving up on the whole idea.  And then she’d got pregnant naturally.  It had seemed like a miracle. (p. 60).

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Synopsis:  Hannah had a perfect life in London—a loving husband, a great job—until she did something shocking. Something that she doesn’t quite understand herself; and now she has landed herself in a high-risk psychiatric unit.

Since Hannah has been admitted, two women have died, including Charlie, one of her closest friends in the institution. It’s a high-risk unit, the authorities say. Deaths happen. But Hannah knows Charlie wouldn’t have killed herself. She is convinced there’s a serial killer picking off the patients one by one, passing their deaths off as suicides. But why? And who will believe her?

Corinne, Hannah’s mother, is worried sick about her eldest daughter. She hates that she’s ended up in the unit, though she knows it’s the best place for her to get the treatment she needs. At first, Corinne assumes Hannah’s outlandish claims about a killer in the unit are just another manifestation of her psychological condition, but as she starts to uncover strange inconsistencies surrounding the unit’s charismatic director, Dr. Roberts, she begins to wonder if her daughter might have stumbled upon the truth.

But who can Corinne trust, when she doesn’t even trust her own daughter?

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Do the snippets grab you?  Would you keep reading?

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