Little Black Lies is a psychiatric novel that develops into a mystery.  Zoe Goldman is a resident working in a psychiatric ward in Buffalo, NY. She and her band of fellow residents struggle with the patients on their ward, trying to help them, or at least stabilize them enough so they can be transferred out. They are busy trying to learn more about their chosen specialty as they go along, but they regularly earn the scorn of their attending psychiatrist who supervises them. Zoe also regularly sees her own personal psychiatrist, to help her both with her anxiety and attention problems, and also to sort out the issues she is dealing with from her past. She lost her birth mother when she was a small child, and she still has nightmares about that. The woman she now calls her mother also has problems: she is suffering from Alzheimer’s and so her recollection of the past is quite hazy, and what she says is not very reliable as Zoe tries to uncover more information about the trauma that has affected her for so much of her life.

There are plenty of quirks and subplots to keep the novel interesting. Zoe is dealing with a separation from her boyfriend Jean-Luc, which she is upset about. She cuts an imposing figure, being over 6 feet tall, but she is not keen to be dating again.  She spends time both with her mother and her brother, who works at a local coffee shop. She gets to know some of the people who work there, and she keeps busy.

But the central plot is about how Zoe delves into her own past and that of her patients. This is where they mystery comes from, and also some implausible parts of the plot. She uses hypnosis as a way to uncover her past, and this makes the novel seem like it is combining a plot device from the 1950s into  a story that is otherwise about up to date psychiatric practice dealing with medication and standard forms of psychotherapy.  Zoe’s psychiatrist highlights that using hypnosis is a problematic way to uncover the past, but still the hypnosis is portrayed as a way of reliving past trauma in a very cinematic fashion that seems a long way from anything that could really happen in credible psychotherapy.

The plot twist that eventually gets revealed is similarly hokey, but it does provide a way of wrapping up the story and it’s the sort of device that typifies this mystery genre. It is the representation of the psychiatric ward and the experience of psychiatric residents that holds the most interest in this novel.

The unabridged audiobook is performed by Kara Bartell.  She does a fine job, keeping the energy levels high and bringing enthusiasm to the reading.

© 2015 Christian Perring

Christian Perring, Professor of Philosophy, Dowling College, New York