ALWAYS WATCHING

A psychiatrist must confront her own past as she tries to help a suicidal young woman.

Dr. Nadine Lavoie is no stranger to loss. Her mother was killed in a car crash when she was a teenager. Her husband died of cancer in early-middle age. Her daughter, Lisa, is probably still alive, but Nadine doesn’t know where; the drug-addicted girl fled home at 18 and lives somewhere on the streets of Victoria. When she isn’t wandering the streets in search of Lisa, Nadine works in the adult psychiatric department of St. Adrian’s Hospital. There, she finds Heather Simeon, a young woman brought in by her husband, Daniel, after a near-successful suicide attempt. Heather is despondent after a miscarriage she blames on herself. She and Daniel left the River of Life commune because they disagreed with its child-rearing practices, and Heather is convinced that if only they had stayed, she could have carried her pregnancy to term. Nadine wonders whether she’s the right therapist for Heather. When she was a teenager, her bipolar mother suddenly packed Nadine and her brother into the car, and the three spent the next eight months at the River of Life until her father arrived and brought them home. But Kevin Nasser, a trusted colleague, assures her that her own experience won’t taint her relationship with Heather. So Nadine proceeds, only to find that her own life—especially her relationship with Aaron Quinn, now the leader of River of Life—holds nearly as much trauma as her patient’s.

The third from Stevens, a specialist in high-toned psychological thrills (Never Knowing, 2011, etc.), delivers the goods once more.