The Clinic by Cate Quinn
Publication Date: January 23, 2024
Summary from NetGalley:
From the critically acclaimed author of Black Widows comes a thriller set in a remote rehab clinic on the Pacific Northwest coast, in which the death of a woman inside prompts her sister to enter the clinic as a patient in order to find the truth. Perfect for fans of Stacy Willingham and Tarryn Fisher!
Meg works for a casino in LA, catching cheaters and popping a few too many pain pills to cope, following a far different path than her sister Haley, a famous actress. But suddenly reports surface of Haley dying at the remote rehab facility where she had been forced to go to get her addictions under control.
There are whispers of suicide, but Meg can’t believe it. She decides that the best way to find out what happened to her sister is to check in herself – to investigate what really happened from the inside.
Battling her own addictions and figuring out the truth will be much more difficult than she imagined, far away from friends, family – and anyone who could help her.
ARC provided by Sourcebooks Landmark via NetGalley for an honest review.
Confession:
The Clinic started off pretty strong with an interesting story, unreliable narrators that I kind of liked and a very atmospheric setting. But it all started to go down hill at the halfway point and by the end I was just not invested in the story anymore.
The story is told from two points of view, Meg and Cara. Meg is an addict and also a poker player. She struggles with relationships with other people, but she can spot a tell and read others body language well. This comes in handy while she investigates her sister’s death. We know from the start that there was friction between the two sisters, and as the story unfolds, some sort of childhood trauma. Because of her addiction, Meg is not a totally reliable narrator. As she detoxes she hallucinates and has trouble understanding what is going on around her. But she was relatable and somewhat likable.
Cara is the manager of the rehab clinic that is the setting for this book. She is somewhat naive about what is really happening at the clinic Her sole job as narrator is to relate much of what goes on behind closed doors with the staff and the police. We only get hints to her background and how she ends up working there and I never felt like we truly got to know her. I often wondered what her role in the story was and why she was even a narrator beyond telling what happened when Meg wasn’t around.
There is a whole cast of secondary characters, some strongly written, others not so much. It was hard to keep track of who was who and their backstories and most of them had little to do with the main story.
The story did start off pretty strong. I was invested in learning what exactly happened to Haley, what their childhood trauma was all about, and what was really going on at this clinic. But as these things were revealed the story seemed to veer off into the implausible quickly. I really thought the trauma was going to be more important to the story than it was and be more traumatic. Also, what happened to Haley was just so out there that it totally took the story off that cliff into total disbelief. The ending also felt a bit rushed, and it didn’t feel like things were really resolved.
The writing was also up and down. The start was strong and I loved the descriptions which were well done, especially the ones about the clinic. But there were a lot of inconsistencies in the story and many minor mistakes. Hopefully these were all caught in the final edit. The pacing was also all over the place. I don’t know anything about rehab clinics, especially ones for the uber rich, but some parts of their therapy seemed wrong and unrealistic.
Reading back over this review, I feel that I have been a bit too negative. I did like the story and thought there were some really good parts, but the things that I didn’t like or struggled with far outweighed the good. But don’t just take me word for this book. There are a lot of reviews that talk glowingly about it. So please check those out before you decide if you want to read this one or not.
Confessions of a Serial Reader 