Summary: Meg is a professional gambler who works for a casino, catching high roller criminals. Her poker skills are also applied to her life – being stoic, not feeling or showing emotion and keeping her nerve under pressure. But Meg’s life is shaken when her sister Haley, a Hollywood star with substance abuse issues who shows up frequently in the scandal headlines, dies at an exclusive rehab facility on the Pacific Northwest coast. The official line is that Haley committed suicide at The Clinic, but Meg doesn’t believe it and is determined to find out what happened to her sibling. She decides to enter The Clinic as a patient to uncover what happened to Haley. Meg has some serious addiction issues of her own, and as she struggles to stay grounded while coming off alcohol and opioids, she realizes that her own life might be in danger.

Thoughts: The Clinic is an engrossing and tense read, set on the Pacific Northwest coast in a high-end private rehab clinic. The remote and foggy setting adds greatly to the ominous mood and sense of impending danger. The author notes that the book was inspired by her own stay in a rehab facility, and certainly her first-hand knowledge gives the program and treatment inside the clinic a sense of authenticity. However, the reader never really receives an adequate sense of the traumatic upbringing that Haley and Meg experienced, which makes their present-day issues difficult to grasp. The short chapters constantly change perspective which can get a little confusing at times. The twist at the end was a stretch for me to believe in, being somewhat unrealistic. And in yet another novel, the affable but slow and bumbling cops arrive at the scene to discover that our heroine has managed everything herself. There are many creative and original elements here, but a predictable ending.