Virgin Lies: A Novel

On a blistering Boston summer day, a nine-year-old girl disappears while crossing a public park.  The only witness is a homeless schizophrenic woman who believes she is under surveillance and whose memory may not be reliable.  Dr. Paul Lucas, an expert at interrogating violent criminals and the insane, is called in to help evaluate the woman's testimony.
      Lucas elicits small details that lead police to three people with no apparent connection: a retired engineer, his disabled wife, and a young man who works at a doughnut shop.  But interviews with each suspect go nowhere, frustrating detectives and calling into doubt Lucas's role in the case.  Believing the girl is alive but without water and soon to die, he is pushed to the brink of a professional abyss--under intense focus from local media, distrusted by police, and pressured by his wife, Abby, whose stake in the search is deeply personal. 
      With time running out, Lucas has to make a choice: to honor and uphold the sworn central oath of his profession, or to cross the line and do whatever it takes to find the girl, even if he must crack the mind of a vulnerable patient.
      Suspenseful, intriguing, and informed by years of real-life experience with violent criminals, Virgin Lies is a first-class thriller.

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, Virgin Lies winds through twists and turns to a place where nothing is as it seems.

Roderick Anscombe, M.D., is a forensic psychiatrist who has interviewed more than two hundred murderers. He is an expert in the detection of deception and teaches interview technique at Harvard Medical School. He is the author of The Interview Room, The Secret Life of Laszlo, Count Dracula, and Shank, and lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
Visit his Web site at www.roderickanscombe.com.