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Summary
Summary
She helps people conquer their demons. But she has a few of her own...
In the halls of the psychiatric ward, Dr. Zoe Goldman is a resident in training, dedicated to helping troubled patients. However, she has plenty of baggage of her own. When Zoe becomes obsessed with questions about her own mother's death, the truth remains tauntingly out of reach, locked away within her nightmares of an uncontrollable fire. And as her adoptive mother loses her memory to dementia, the time to find the answers is running out.
As Zoe digs deeper, she realizes that the danger is not just in her dreams but is now close at hand. And she has no choice but to face what terrifies her the most. Because what she can't remember just might kill her.
Little Black Lies is about madness and memory - and the dangerous, little lies we tell ourselves just to survive.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Block's intriguing debut, a psychological thriller, relies too much on a final revelation that many readers will anticipate. Dr. Zoe Goldman, a psychiatry resident at a Buffalo, N.Y., hospital, has a lot of emotional baggage. Her mother died in a fire, a trauma that still gives her nightmares in which her hands are bleeding and she is hiding from someone, as the house blazes around her. Zoe works with her therapist to sort out the meaning of the dreams and why they have recurred after several years of peace. Zoe must also deal with her adoptive mother's descent into dementia. As she tries to sort through the mysteries of her own past, Zoe also has a challenging patient: Sofia Vallano, who has been institutionalized for more than two decades for having murdered her mother. Block's own training makes the medicine convincing, but the careful work she's done in creating an interesting lead comes undone by the end. Agent: Rachel Eckstrom, Irene Goodman Literary Agency. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Dr. Zoe Goldman is a resident in psychiatry at a Buffalo, New York, hospital. She takes a real dislike to one of her patients, Sofia, a beautiful sociopath who murdered her mother, maimed her brother, and has spent more than 20 years in hospitals. Zoe's supervisor suggests that Sofia be released, which makes Zoe very uncomfortable. Meanwhile, Zoe is dealing with personal issues: her boyfriend recently moved away, and the long-distance relationship is strained. The mother who adopted her is suffering from increasing dementia, and Zoe is desperate for information about her birth mother. The deeper she delves into her past, the more confused she gets. She is having recurring nightmares from her childhood, when she was caught in a house fire, and her therapist reluctantly tries hypnosis with minimal results. This is a serious look at a variety of mental illnesses, especially blocked memories, but the thriller element isn't ignored. The suspense keeps building throughout until the shocking ending. This is a riveting debut from a promising new author.--Alesi, Stacy Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Tess's new case presents a huge challenge for this first-time parent. Years ago, a brilliant, successful and thoroughly unlikable lawyer named Melisandre Harris Dawes left her baby daughter in a parked car and watched her die. After two high-profile trials in which she was acquitted on the grounds of postpartum psychosis, Melisandre abandoned her two older daughters and fled the country. Now she's back, with a documentary filmmaker on the payroll, to reconcile with her daughters and make a movie of the event. Against her better judgment, Tess agrees to do a friend a favor and provide protection for this public pariah. But something tells her it's not going to be an easy job. Lippman knows her stuff and introduces some clever plot twists and turns (not to mention a murder). But her character studies, largely drawn from the way people feel about having children, are exceptional. Melisandre may not be anyone's idea of a model mother, but does that make her a murderer? And who's to say what makes a good parent? After all, Tess's friend and partner, Sandy Sanchez, responded to single parenthood by institutionalizing his profoundly disturbed son. ("The best thing about Mary's death was that Sandy could stop pretending to care about him.") Even Tess, besotted with love for her little hellion, has to acknowledge that having children isn't all it's cracked up to be. "No one tells you that it's, well, kind of boring," she admits. "Being a mom." At least until the next tantrum. THE TWO KEY players in Lou Berney's superb regional mystery, THE LONG AND FARAWAY GONE (Morrow/HarperCollins, paper, $14.99), suffer from separate but equally crushing cases of survivor guilt. Wyatt Rivers is a low-rent Las Vegas P.I. who does background checks on prospective casino hires. But back in the summer of 1986, when he was 15 years old and working at a movie theater in Oklahoma City, he was the only person left alive when three masked gunmen robbed the theater, killing the manager and the other five teenagers on staff. At the end of that long-ago summer, 17-year-old Genevieve Rosales, who "looked like a girl who was looking for trouble," vanished from the Oklahoma State Fair, leaving her 12-year-old sister, Julianna, traumatized for life. Julianna grew up to be a nurse, but she never left Oklahoma City, and she never stopped trying to solve the mystery of her sister's disappearance. Wyatt thought he'd suppressed the memory of his own nightmare, but when a job he can't refuse takes him back home, he finds himself struggling with the question that still gnaws at him: "Why me?" Berney tells both their stories with supreme sensitivity, exploring "the landscape of memory" that keeps shifting beneath our feet, opening up the graves of all those ghosts we thought we'd buried. "SHE PICKS AN invisible bug off her face." On that intriguing note Sandra Block begins her offbeat first novel, LITTLE BLACK LIES (Grand Central, paper, $15), a psychological suspense story smartly narrated by Dr. Zoe Goldman, a young psychiatrist doing her residency at a Buffalo hospital. Watching her mother slip into dementia has awakened Zoe's curiosity about her birth mother, who died in a house fire when Zoe was only 4. That mother fixation also draws her to a new patient, a certifiable psycho who murdered her own mother at the age of 14 and has spent more than 20 years in state mental wards. It's too bad the plot is so schematic, because the hospital scenes play well and Zoe has a quick wit that emerges in wickedly unexpected ways. HIGH, DRY and severely beautiful - that's the terrain Ben Jones sees from the cab of his 28-foot tractor-trailer rig in THE NEVER-OPEN DESERT DINER (Caravel, $25), a wondrously strange first novel by James Anderson. Ben's route is a 100-mile stretch of State Road 117 in a desolate section of Utah's high desert. His customers are isolated cattle ranchers and ornery "desert rats" who depend on him for their bales of barbed wire and cases of chili. The best part of his run is always a stop at Walt Butterfield's pristinely preserved but permanently closed vintage diner in the middle of nowhere. There's a sad story behind that, but there are a lot of sad stories on Ben's route (including his own), and Anderson tells them in a voice that's ... well, high, dry and severely beautiful. Ben's dull life takes a dangerous turn when he happens on the model home for an unbuilt housing development and discovers an attractive woman inside, playing a cello with no strings. There's a sad story behind that too, so let's just say that Anderson is one fine storyteller.
