Menace (Austin Macauley, 2017)—a thriller in which an intern psychologist at a university counselling center must judge the dangerousness of her clients, against a background of faculty controversy over guns on campus and concerns for student safety.
Synopsis
There is tension at the university. The campus police are pressing for greater fire-power. The controversial new university president, a retired military intelligence officer who saw action in Iraq, needs to make a far-reaching decision. Faculty concerns about guns on campus must be weighed against student safety. The intern psychologist at the student health center has a new and potentially violent client she worries might be stalking her. Is he a threat? Could he be the next campus shooter? Lying darkly under the elegant landscaping of the university is an elaborate network of floodwater tunnels and drains. Designed to prevent risks, do they now represent danger? Like the tunnels, the questions in this thriller keep twisting and turning.
REVIEW OF MENACE
by Elaine Heiby, PhD
Professor of Psychology
I really enjoyed this book and found it hard to put down. MENACE is a psychological thriller and mystery insightfully written by psychologist-author Ian M Evans. You get a feel for each character not only through dialogue and body language but also through their inner thoughts, emotions, and intuitions. The reader gets to know the main characters better than they seem to know themselves.
MENACE deals with issues related to how universities handle the possibility of a campus shooting. Do you arm campus security with semi-automatic rifles? Do you rely on the counseling center to identify violent students? How do you predict who will go on a rampage? Can violence be predicted from some psychological diagnosis and therapy sessions? MENACE deals with these thorny issues in a clever and novel way. Curtis is an odd student who shows up at the campus counseling center around the same time the university is putting into place a committee to develop a procedure for dealing with the possibility of a shooting on campus. His psychologist Katrina Moss and psychiatrist Ali Abidi at the counseling center are also involved with the committee. They must decide whether Curtis is a threat.
The plot unfolds in fascinating ways and has interesting characters that feel realistic. There is a voyeur. There are rednecks. There are issues from the Iraq war. There are tunnels under the campus that provide a peculiar “chase” scene. The story moves quickly and unfolds in unpredictable ways. Indeed, I read this book twice to see if I could have predicted the end, but I could not.