Privileged Information by Stephen White

I’m on a streak of finding well-seasoned prolific authors that I have not known about, and thanks goes to friend Mark Rogers for this excellent psychological thriller/crime novel. Stephen White has written 20 novels and this is the first of the Alan Gregory series, a clinical psychologist. There are lots of similarities in this novel to the work of Jonathan Kellerman, a comparison which is a favorable one for me. As a psychiatrist/psychoanalyst, I found Privileged Information to be better than most such novels which, among other things, explore the sexual boundaries of doctors and patients. Although Gregory is accused of doing so, in this story, the doctor does not sleep with his patients. Rather, White works a clear understanding of transference into the story and explains how that plays out with his patients and their fantasies. How does a doctor deal with false charges while still honoring a patient’s right to confidentiality? Of course, death does not change a patient’s right to confidentiality.

The book starts with Gregory being informed by a police detective of the apparent suicide of one of his patients, a death which greatly surprises him. Then, more of his patients die, and he struggles to understand the connections between those events. The character development and the unfolding of the plot are very well done. This is an old book, written in 1991, and since it is the first of the series, I guessing that I have lots of good stories to look forward to. I literally did not put this one down, finished it in less than a day. I’ll immediately acquire another one of his books and put it in the "to be read" stack.