The Interview Room
by Roderick Anscombe
St. Martin’s Press, June 2005
320 pp.
Translation rights: Anne Edelstein Literary Agency
*I’m pleased to write that we just made a two book sale for THE INTERVIEW ROOM in Holland, to Sijthoff. THE INTERVIEW ROOM will be their lead title for the Summer 2006 list. Book two of this contract will be another thriller with the same protagonist as THE INTERVIEW ROOM.
A NOVEL BY RODERICK ANSCOMBE
THE THREE RULES OF MURDER ARE AS FOLLOWS:
Rule #1: Work alone.
Rule #2: Tell no one.
Rule #3: Don’t rush it.
Every year hundreds of thrillers every feature high-tech forensics, Roderick Anscombe’s THE INTERVIEW ROOM (St. Martin’s Press; June 2005; $24.95 hardcover; ISBN: 0-312-32399-8) makes the interrogation of the suspect the center of attention.
Like the author, Roderick Anscombe, protagonist Paul Lucas is a forensic psychiatrist in a maximum security prison for the criminally insane. His patient, Craig Cavanaugh, a member of a wealthy and influential family, is charged with stalking a Harvard teaching assistant, Natalie Davis. Paul is an expert in the detection of lying, but Craig tests his abilities with disclosures that come too close to home. Against his better judgment, Paul agrees to take Craig under his psychiatric care as a condition of his release from prison – only to be trapped in a frightening net of circumstances that turn his wife against him and implicate him in murder.
Readers will discover that the interview to assess the likelihood of a patient’s dangerous behavior is as precise and meticulous as the examination of an entry wound. An interrogation is persistent, methodical, and analytical. It’s the words, the gestures, and tiny muscle movements of the face, rather than enzymatic reagents or computer-simulation ballistics, that are the machinery moving THE INTERVIEW ROOM.
Book Description
Working in a maximum-security prison for the criminally insane, psychiatrist Paul Lucas confronts the darkest and most frightening side of humanity. But he has never interviewed a patient like Craig Cavanaugh. The scion of a wealthy and influential family, Craig is poised, articulate, knowing, a Harvard man whose obsessive crush on a teaching assistant led him to stalk her, and landed him in Paul’s care on an outpatient basis.
Paul is an expert in detecting lies, but his patient tests him with disclosures and questions that come unsettlingly close to home. For Craig is familiar with details of Paul’s life: where he lives, his wife Abby’s work schedule, and the terrible accident that killed their two-year-old son and left their marriage in a precarious balance between love and grief. Then Paul seems to spot Craig observing him in a crowded mall, and at home he notices things slightly out of place or missing, including the handgun he keeps for personal protection.
Paul soon is trapped in an ever-tightening web of circumstance and scrutiny that implicates him in the eyes of his wife, his colleagues, and eventually the police. As the battle of wits turns deadly, with his career on the line and his life over the edge, Paul must learn to play the game by Craig’s rules-for he who tells the best lie wins.
Smart and wickedly suspenseful, The Interview Room winds through twists and turns to a place where nothing is as it seems.
Reviews:
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Anscombe (Shank) returns with a riveting, mental obstacle course of a novel. Paul Lucas, a brilliant forensic psychiatrist struggling to move on after the death of his infant son, is treating venomous Craig Cavanaugh, the teenage scion of a wealthy family. Sent to the Sanders Institute for stalking Natalie Davis, a mousy teaching assistant at Harvard who rejected him repeatedly, Cavanaugh sets out to match wits with, and destroy, Lucas. Told in Lucas’s voice, the novel is fueled by Cavanaugh’s ego and deep-seated obsession, and by Lucas’s quick-witted, lie-discerning one-upping of the clever adolescent. As Lucas struggles to stay in control, their grueling sessions devolve into chest-puffing wars of strategy, lies and threats. Cavanaugh stealthily invades Lucas’s personal life, works alongside his distraught wife, Abby, at her social work agency, and then murders the police officer who pulled Abby out of the wreck that killed their child—and frames Lucas for the crime. The possibly overmatched psychiatrist must clear his name, attempt to reunite with his estranged wife and generally stop Cavanaugh from throwing a lit match onto Lucas’s well-lacquered existence. Anscombe, a forensic psychiatrist himself, delivers precise, perfectly calibrated thrills one after another in an implosive story that takes oedipal struggle to the breaking point. (June 1)
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From Booklist
Anscombe’s latest is a riveting, nuanced psychological thriller. Forensic psychiatrist Paul Lucas is called in to ascertain if Craig, a young, well-connected charmer accused of stalking his teaching assistant, can be committed as criminally insane. When Craig turns out to be merely evil, he is released on condition that he submit to ongoing therapy with Dr. Lucas, and it isn’t long before Craig has turned the tables on his doctor, creeping inside his therapist’s head and into his life, insinuating his way into a home already unsettled by the recent death of a child. Anscombe’s own background in criminal psychiatry shines forth in the brilliantly realized interactions in and out of the interview room, an intriguing, moment-by-moment scrimmage of urges, hesitations, revelations, and lies. The mounting tide of paranoia and deception continues to swell until the very end, giving this novel the kind of mainstream appeal associated with Harlan Coben and Jonathan Kellerman. Don’t wait for the movie. David Wright
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Quotes:
“The most original thriller I have read in a long, long time, with pacing and cutting-edge medicine that will keep you up late into the night. Roderick Anscombe is a welcome new voice in suspense. His writing is lean and sharp, with characters that matter, and ideas that are totally fresh."
-Michael Palmer, New York Times bestselling author of The Society and Extreme Measures
"The Interview Room is a new kind of thriller-provocative, entertaining, and morally
chilling, for people who like their justice subtle. A sly shocker that will invade your psyche and shake up your beliefs about good people and how bad they can get, it’s an absorbing novel."
-Perri O’Shaughnessy, New York Times bestselling author of Unlucky in Law and Presumption of Death
"That Roderick Anscombe perfectly captures both worlds, that of a forensic psychiatrist as well as a sociopathic stalker, isn’t surprising. But that he manages to convey the intersection of those worlds with such a gripping, gritty realism is astonishing and makes for a totally engrossing read."
-Doreen Orion, M.D., forensic psychiatrist and author of I Know You Really Love Me
About the Author
Roderick Anscombe evaluates and treats the criminally insane in a maximum security hospital in Massachusetts. He is a forensic psychiatrist and Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. The author of two previous novels, The Secret Life of Lazlo, Count Dracula and Shank, he lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
http://www.roderickanscombe.com/html/the_interview_room.html