Haunting, cerebral, and unsettling…
Lively’s latest is a slow-burn psychological mystery that explores the blurry line between reality and delusion. When Dallas attorney Simon Steed is hired by a mysterious woman, Neva Storm, to probate her father’s will, he’s drawn into a web of unanswered calls, suspicious deaths, and vanishing evidence. However, with a history of hallucinations and a diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder, Simon begins to wonder: Is Neva real, or a shadow from his past returning to destroy him?
The tension builds slowly. Simon’s routines, such as checking his answering machine, filing motions, and showing up in court, are all rendered with a kind of weary discipline that makes his mental spiral that much more disorienting. Neva, for her part, is intriguingly “invisible.” She never appears on the page, yet everything revolves around her. She might be a manipulative murderer, a phantom projection, or both. The reader isn’t sure, and neither is Simon. While the pacing might be too gradual for readers expecting a courtroom thriller or hard-boiled detective story, it’s well-suited to the protagonist’s emotional state. At its heart, the novel explores what it means to live in the liminal space between sanity and delusion, memory and reality. It’s also a quiet indictment of how mental illness is treated over time: medicated into silence, left unquestioned, and eventually, just accepted.
A slow-burn psychological mystery set against the backdrop of the legal world, this is a thoughtful, unsettling look at the fragility of memory, the unreliability of truth, and the dangers of believing your own mind. A stunner.
Treaty Oak Publishers
Pub date July 11, 2025
ISBN 978-1959127468
Price $10.99 (USD) Paperback