Comfort Measures

Dr. Cassidy Greer is the doctor every family prays for at the end. Calm. Warm. Brilliant. The best palliative care physician in the state of Texas - the one who holds your hand while you die, and makes sure it doesn't hurt.

She has been waiting twenty-nine years to hold this particular hand.

When Cassidy moves her husband and teenage daughter back to Halden, the small Texas town she left as a grieving teenager, everyone assumes she's come home to give back. She has. Just not in the way anyone thinks.

Fifty years ago, Pastor Dan Whitfield built a mega-church, a spotless reputation, and a workshop where he did unthinkable things to the children the whole town trusted him with - including Cassidy, and including her best friend, Rachel, who didn't survive what he did to her. Halden never saw it. Halden couldn't afford to see it. So Cassidy stopped waiting for justice and became it: she spent her entire adult life building the one career that would guarantee she was standing at his bedside when the county finally handed him over to somebody's care.

Now he's dying, slowly, his mind sharp as ever - and his devoted new doctor has started humming a hymn only a dead girl ever sang quite that way.

Told across two timelines - the golden, tightly-wound friendship of the 1990s sliding inexorably toward tragedy, and a present-day campaign of exquisite, deniable psychological reckoning - Comfort Measures is a revenge story unlike any you've read, because its avenger isn't haunted, isn't unraveling, doesn't lose a single night's sleep. She is, by every visible measure, happy. She loves her family. She grieves her dying friend. She comforts, expertly and sincerely, the man she is quietly dismantling - and every kindness she shows him is completely real.

That's what makes it unforgettable.

A literary psychological novel about grief, complicity, and the terrible patience of love, Comfort Measures asks what a good death is actually worth - and to whom.

For readers of Kate Elizabeth Russell's My Dark Vanessa and Gillian Flynn - a story that will make you hold your breath at the bedside and keep you there long after the last page.