The Mara Voss Files The Patient Hours: A Mara Voss Novel, Book 1, (Paperback)

She went to her doctor for help carrying less. <p>They used her to carry something else entirely.</p><p>Chicago. A locked office on the fourteenth floor of a North<br>Michigan Avenue clinic. A psychiatrist found dead in his chair<br>at three in the morning, a half-drunk cup of chamomile tea on<br>the table beside him. The medical examiner rules it a cardiac<br>event. Clean. Plausible. Final.</p><p>Sylvia Vance doesn't believe it. She hires Mara Voss.</p><p>Mara is a former FBI forensic psychologist who left the Bureau<br>three years ago under circumstances she hasn't fully explained -<br>not to anyone else, and not entirely to herself. She works<br>Chicago now as an unlicensed private investigator, building<br>cases the way she always has: from the outside in, the<br>documentary record first, the human cost alongside it.</p><p>What she finds in the clinic files doesn't look like a murder.<br>It looks like a research program. Six patients. Evening sessions<br>off the record. A supplement protocol that does more than reduce<br>inflammation. And a recurring gap in each patient's memory -<br>always a Tuesday, always the same window of hours - that every<br>one of them has filed under <i>the treatment working</i>.</p><p>The treatment was working. Just not the way they thought.</p><p>As Mara moves through the lives of six Chicagoans who have<br>been used - without their knowledge, without their consent - as<br>instruments of a federal program designed to protect a<br>thirty-one-million-dollar procurement fraud, she begins to<br>understand the full shape of what she is dealing with. The<br>program is more sophisticated than any of its subjects know.<br>The people behind it have significant resources and a<br>demonstrated willingness to use them. And one of the six - the<br>one the program was most carefully built around - is still<br>carrying something she cannot access, cannot name, and cannot<br>yet resist.</p><p>The trigger is a phrase. The phrase is three words.</p><p><i>The Patient Hours</i> is a psychological thriller about<br>institutional betrayal, cognitive manipulation, and what it<br>costs to hold a door closed from the inside. It is about the<br>people who came for help and were used. The people who tried<br>to fix what they had built and ran out of time. And the<br>investigator who builds the case that has been waiting -<br>patient, precise, and inevitable - for someone to carry it.</p><p><b>Perfect for fans of Tana French, S.J. Watson, <br>and A.J. Finn.</b></p><p>&amp;#8213;&amp;#8213;&amp;#8213;</p><p><b>The Mara Voss Files</b> </p><p>Book 1: <i>The Patient Hours</i> - Available Now </p><p>Book 2: <i>What the Silence Keeps</i> - Coming Soon </p><p>Book 3: <i>Every Version of You</i> - Coming Soon</p>

• The Mara Voss Files The Patient Hours: A Mara Voss Novel, Book 1, (Paperback)
• Author: Nader Ben
• ISBN: 9798198352315
• Format: Paperback
• Publication Date: 2026-05-23
• Page Count: 280