Resurrection Kill - by Laura Joh Rowland (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

An amnesic psychiatrist returns to the hospital where she was institutionalized as a teen to find answers, perfect for fans of The Silent Patient and Shutter Island.

Forgetting can be dangerous. Remembering can be fatal.

New York State, 1953. Dr. Claire Kendall is a psychiatrist-in-training at Resurrection Kill Hospital, a luxurious private and isolated mental institution for the wealthy. But under her mask of professionalism, Claire has a secret: She was a patient at the hospital when she was fourteen.

With gaps in her memory, Claire is determined to discover what really happened the summer she was institutionalized--even if it means uncovering the dangerous secrets hiding at Resurrection Kill. Before long, Claire takes a special interest in a teenage patient, Rory Kirkpatrick--a free-spirited girl who is also determined to uncover Resurrection Kill Hospital's dark past. Claire indulges Rory's rebellious nature, hoping to glean clues that might help in her own search for the truth.

But the hunt for answers triggers flashbacks of Claire's painful childhood--her father's cruelty, her mother's alcoholism, her beloved older brother's death. The deeper she probes her own past, the more she remembers about the summer that changed everything. And as she delves deeper into her own mind, she'll come to find that her sanity grows more fragile by the day and that some secrets are meant to stay buried. She'll discover that remembering may come at the cost of her life.

Review Quotes

Praise for Resurrection Kill
"Moving and evocative . . . [Rowland] outdoes herself here, transporting us back to a time that feels more familiar to a modern reader but also strangely, unsettlingly different. There are similarities in theme and texture to Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island (also set in the 1950s), but Rowland is telling her own story, in her own way."
--Booklist

"Rowland fortifies her well-oiled plot with fascinating historical texture. This will keep readers turning pages well into the night."
--Publishers Weekly

"Resurrection Kill by Laura Joh Rowland is everything I love in a thriller: intriguing and chilling, vivid and memorable, a compelling and deeply personal story about one woman's search for answers in an era when women were committed to mental hospitals for virtually anything that was outside the cultural norm. That Resurrection Kill Hospital is an upscale facility for the super rich only makes the procedures the women are subjected to all the more barbaric. Claire's courage and fearlessness under increasingly dangerous circumstances made me want to stand up and cheer. I loved this book!"
--Karen Dionne, author of #1 international bestseller The Marsh King's Daughter and The Wicked Sister

About the Author

Laura Joh Rowland is the award-winning author of the samurai detective Sano Ichirō mystery series set in seventeenth-century Japan, as well as a historical suspense series starring Charlotte Brontë. Her work has been published in twenty-one countries; nominated for the Anthony Award, the Hammett Prize, and the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award; won RT Magazine's Reader's Choice Award; and been included in the Wall Street Journal's list of the five best historical mystery novels. Laura holds a bachelor of science and a master of public health degree from the University of Michigan. She is a former aerospace scientist, a painter, and a cartoonist. She lives in New York City with her husband Marty.