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A Quiet Kind of Poison
Hardcover
Mystery & ThrillerGeneral Fiction
Publisher: Dorrway Publishing
Published: Jun 8 2026
Pages: 374
Weight: 1.48
Height: 1.00 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
How do you recognize harm when it arrives disguised as help?
After losing her son and both parents within six months, Bernice Barbier begins slipping beneath the weight of compounded grief. Exhaustion, confusion, and emotional withdrawal slowly reshape her life, leaving her husband Roy desperate to hold their world together. Believing he can no longer care for her alone, he hires Sarah-a calm, capable nursing student whose quiet competence quickly becomes indispensable.
Sarah brings order to the home: medications are timed, meals monitored, routines enforced. Bernice grows quieter, more compliant, increasingly dependent. Roy, grieving himself, mistakes the changes for illness and recovery. But over time, Bernice's world narrows. Moments of clarity are labeled agitation. Emotional responses become symptoms. The salon she once ran with confidence becomes a controlled sickroom where stillness is treated as progress.
Across the driveway, Rose notices the unsettling silence surrounding the Barbier house. What begins as concern slowly sharpens into suspicion after she discovers Bernice restrained inside the converted salon space. Yet nothing appears abusive. The room is spotless. Organized. Managed. Rose chooses observation over accusation, watching for patterns she cannot yet explain.
As Bernice struggles against growing sedation and cognitive fog, small inconsistencies begin surfacing: a metallic taste after medication, awareness that comes and goes unpredictably, and the lingering sense that her body is reacting to something beyond grief alone.
When Roy uncovers troubling medication discrepancies with the help of a local pharmacist, he realizes Bernice's decline may not have been inevitable after all.
A Quiet Kind of Poison is a slow-burn domestic psychological suspense novel about grief, caregiving, manipulation, emotional abuse, and the dangerous intimacy of trusting the wrong person.
Perfect for readers of emotionally layered psychological thrillers, family-centered suspense, and women's fiction with dark emotional depth.
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