HYSTERIA

Clinical psychologist Dr. Alexander Gregory, in Paris to deliver a lecture on forensic profiling, is pulled into a case that will test him and the members of the Brigade Criminelle in unexpected ways.

In the middle of one night during Fashion Week, guests in the Hôtel Violette, awakened by the crashes of an assault, enter model Camille Duquette’s room to find her brutally slashed. Camille hasn’t been killed, but her career has been scuttled by a facial wound that’s bound to leave a lasting scar. In the meantime, she won’t, or can’t, say a word to Captain Mathis Durand or the rest of his squad. Urged to give his opinion, Gregory offers a diagnosis of selective mutism and suggests that Camille’s regimen of painkillers be cut back. Before he knows it, Gregory’s replaced Dr. Ernesto Gonzalez as Camille’s primary caregiver, a position that forces him to walk a tightrope between overseeing her recovery and extracting testimony from her once her voice returns. Gregory’s dicey position is complicated even further by his fling with Margot, a jazz club chanteuse more commonly known in fashion house Maison Leroux, where she and Camille both worked, as Madeleine Paquet, a model who was among the first on the scene of Camille’s assault. As Gregory, still haunted by the line he crossed in caring for his terminally ill mother, struggles to treat Camille as both a witness and a patient, the news arrives that a second model has been attacked—and this time her assailant has made sure to finish the job. The cascade of revelations that follows is so rich and varied that readers, whatever their pleasure, are likely to find at least some of them compelling.

All these felonies, and Fashion Week too.