Kessa Hartman’s life is narrowed by poverty, chronic pain, a dying hometown, and the quiet burden of caring for her ailing mother. Relief feels impossible—until she meets Dr. Cyrus Ashford.
Cyrus is everything Kessa believes a doctor should be: brilliant, controlled, authoritative. To her, he represents escape, safety, and meaning. To him, she is not a whole person—but a subject. A case. An opportunity.
As care slips into control, and clinical distance gives way to fixation, the boundaries between treatment, consent, and desire begin to erode. What follows is a pathological dance of dependence and domination that drives both doctor and patient toward irrevocable ruin.
Told with piercing clarity and psychological realism through dual POV, A Perfect Patient is a slow-burn character study of obsession, delusion, and the catastrophic consequences of power misused. Refusing comfort or easy answers, the novel leaves readers unsettled, mesmerized, and haunted long after the final page.
Fans of Misery, The Silent Patient, Eileen, and the raw, unvarnished intimacy of the YouTube project Soft White Underbelly will find themselves unable to put this novel down.
A hypnotic, relentless, slow-burn descent into control and the darkest corners of desire.
This novel is not a typical dark romance. It is a transgressive, psychosexual character study that contains complex and disturbing elements, including:
- Power Imbalance & Coercive Control
- Medical Ethics Violations & Abuse of Authority
- Explicit Clinical / Examination Details
- Addiction & Mental Illness
- Class Disparity & Failures in Women’s Healthcare
