Lessons of Evil by Linda B. Myers

WHAT PSYCHOLOGIST LAURA COVINGTON LEARNS IS UNIMAGINABLE …
WHAT SHE DOES IS UNPRECEDENTED.

Portland, Oregon, 1989. Respected psychologist LAURA COVINGTON makes the life changing decision to give up her cushy corporate job and devote herself to community mental health. She desires a needier, grittier case load, and does she ever get it. She could never have anticipated the destructive secrets she exposes at her new job in the Oregon desert.

Laura’s private life changes as radically as her professional life. She has envisioned herself free to do as she will. But when she moves, it is not alone. She must take along her barracuda of a mother, too fragile after a fall to continue living alone. In addition, Laura inherits a troubled child from a former client. Becoming a mother at forty was the last thing on her mind. Well maybe it wasn’t as big a surprise as the romance that walks smack into her heart.

At community mental health, her new clients are nearer society’s bottom rungs than her old corporate clientele’s issues with rage management or alcohol abuse. There’s the schizophrenic Diaper Man and the lad who lives with Vampirism and Woodrow in his aluminum cone hat fending off aliens. Her new boss is almost as hard to understand as her clients, and meets Laura with an antagonism that she doesn’t understand.

One of her new clients is so traumatized he has more than one personality with which he faces the world. Through him, Laura becomes convinced that, behind the scenes, a psychopath posing as head of a cult is actually using mental and physical torture to “create” an army of troubled souls that responds to his every wish.

Laura fights back, as ethically as she knows how. But the tension and terror escalate when those she loves are threatened, tortured or murdered. Laura comes face to face with how far she is willing to go to protect her own.