Review: A Madness So Discreet by Mindy McGinnis

Title: A Madness So Discreet
Author: Mindy McGinnis
Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books
Release date: October 6th 2015
Source: Edelweiss
Format: eARC

Rating: 3.5/5

Buy on: Amazon | B&N | BookDepository

Grace Mae knows madness.

She keeps it locked away, along with her voice, trapped deep inside a brilliant mind that cannot forget horrific family secrets. Those secrets, along with the bulge in her belly, land her in a Boston insane asylum.

When her voice returns in a burst of violence, Grace is banished to the dark cellars, where her mind is discovered by a visiting doctor who dabbles in the new study of criminal psychology. With her keen eyes and sharp memory, Grace will make the perfect assistant at crime scenes. Escaping from Boston to the safety of an ethical Ohio asylum, Grace finds friendship and hope, hints of a life she should have had. But gruesome nights bring Grace and the doctor into the circle of a killer who stalks young women. Grace, continuing to operate under the cloak of madness, must hunt a murderer while she confronts the demons in her own past.

In this beautifully twisted historical thriller, Mindy McGinnis, acclaimed author of Not a Drop to Drink and In a Handful of Dust, explores the fine line between sanity and insanity, good and evil—and the madness that exists in all of us. 

A Madness So Discreet is a historical murder mystery novel that takes place within an insane asylum and begins with Grace Mae as a mental patient and the reason of why she´s there is because she´s a daughter of respectable family and is pregnant, so to hide the fact her parents admitted her to the asylum for the duration of her pregnancy. But it is there in the asylum, despite the treatment and care she receives as a mental patient, where she feels safer than at home, so with the help of Doctor Thornhollow, she manages to escape the Boston asylum and moves to the Ohio asylum, where she have a more humane treatment as a patient.

Dr. Thornhollow, is a young doctor, who is obsessed with criminal minds, and he´s studying murders and trying to determine the profile of the murderer according to details of the crime scenes and where there were committed. When he meets Grace, he decides to help her due to her good memory and her gift of observation to detail, so she becomes his assistant and together they watched crime scenes trying to make profiles of murderers (much like the TV show Criminal Minds, but when science was in its infancy), but only as observers with the permission of the police. And it´s by means of their nocturnal visits to various crime scenes that both the Doctor Thornhollow and Grace conclude that there is a serial killer in their city that targets young women and that the police are not making the connection..

The first part of this book takes place at the Boston asylum and is very disturbing, due to the methods the asylum use in their patients and the doctors and staff are horrible. This part is very dark and raw.

The second part of the book takes place when Grace is at the Ohio asylum, which has a better staff, and the doctor who is in charge is Thornhollow and patients have a little more freedom and humane treatment, this part was less dark. And is in this part where the mystery begins and we get to know more about Grace.

On the third part of the book, the plot changes and Grace´s problems are more personal and is where she confronts her demons.

Overall, A Madness So Discreet it was a good read, it´s a very interesting, dark, raw historical thriller. My favorite part is the part where the Doctor and Grace are doing profiles of potential murderers. As this is the third book I´ve read written by Mindy, I already had the idea that there would be romance and I was right, plus it was not necessary. It was an interesting read, that speaks a lot about the beginnings of criminal psychology.

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