Not So Innocent

About the Book

The story begins to unfold in a psychoanalyst’s office as three different patients, in the course of their analyses, refer independently to a murder/suicide that shook the city a few years earlier. Soon after, a similar tragedy takes place a few blocks from the analyst’s office. The similarities are so amazing that the police reopen the investigation of the first tragedy, now believed to be a double murder, and patients become suspects.

The treating analyst, dubbed by one of the patients as Frank Voyeur, narrates the story in retrospect to his son, Jack, a college student with growing skepticism of psychoanalysis. With the analyst’s wife as moderator, the dialogue between father and son recounts the complex details of the criminal investigation and the unexpected solution during the trial, as well as fragments of the three analyses, which end up mobilizing Jack’s unresolved antagonism with his father. The experience turns into a journey of self-discovery for Jack. As for the three patients, the unfolding psychoanalytic process in each case sheds light on the story behind the story: human behavior itself.

About the Author

Don Stevenson was born in Cartagena, Colombia, where he grew up in a family of Spanish and Scottish traditions. After graduating from medical school, he got married and emigrated to the United States where he trained in psychiatry and psychoanalysis. During the past 25 years he has been practicing psychiatry and psychoanalysis in Norfolk, Virginia, and is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Eastern Virginia Medical School. In addition to this novel, Don is working on a volume of short stories in Spanish.