The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog.

Here are two novels in which key characters are named Gabe. The similarity ends there.

The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides is a psychological thriller that plumbs the depth of the human psyche. The simplest narrative – a woman is convicted of murdering her husband, becomes mute, is sent for years to a mental health hospital, where a psychiatrist takes up her case.  The psychiatrist, Theo Faber, is driven to find out the truth about the killing and disentangle the mystery of why the wife, artist Alicia Berenson, stopped talking, expressing herself only through her painting.

The reader is drawn ever more deeply into the probe, told in the first person by Theo, whose unconventional therapeutic treatment becomes more like a detective’s modus operandi. Little by little, Theo’s own background and relationship with his wife, Kathy, come to resonate with Alicia’s history, until the stories are so intertwined that ZAP – I’m not going to tell you the rest. Growing tension from the deep dive into trauma, obsessive love, jealousy, suspicion, paranoia, criminal behavior, mental illness, projection, transference, delusions, psychosis and institutional dysfunction keeps the reader involved till the very last page. As for the major twist in the narrative, I didn’t see it coming. Michaelides is a skilled storyteller. His chapters are short and ricochet back and forth. His descriptions are cinematic.  A riveting book that sticks with you long after the last page is turned (or clicked, if you read on a Kindle).

Son of a Gun by Ted Sutton is a historical novel that also contains a mystery, but a mystery without a body.  This debut novel by Ted Sutton springs from some real-life characters brought together in an unlikely fictional situation with raucous consequences. Full disclosure: the author is a dear friend. A Cambridge-based psychologist, he is the son of a talented song-and-dance performer who was a member of a Ziegfeld Follies-type group call Colosimo Cuties.  They entertained at Colosimo’s Nightclub in Chicago, which, while fronting for illicit business, included in its clientele both mobsters and Chicago’s power elite.  Sutton told me his real-life mother and father, who was in the furniture business, had actually met at Colosimo’s.

Sutton’s mother, Geri Willow (represented by the fictional Pearl in his novel) had also met notorious gangster Al Capone and, in her last years, shared some stories with her author son as she descended into the grasp of Alzheimer’s disease. Al Capone is reflected by the made-up character Ketzel, Pearl’s nickname for Scarface Capone. Another key character is Gabe (stand-in for Sutton), a rather self-efffacing intellectual type based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

From these colorful characters emerges a fantastical story of how Gabe becomes convinced that Pearl had an affair with already-married Capone and that Gabe is the love child of that liaison.  Most of the book is devoted to Gabe’s monumental research efforts to prove that he is the son of one of the nation’s most notorious mobsters. His new obsession takes him to Florida to confront Capone’s son (Sonny). Gabe tests his new-found person and determines to prove he shares Scarface’s DNA by carrying a toy gun (leading to a laugh-out-loud part of the story line). This spurs him to join a gun club and take classes to learn to shoot. Author Sutton did just that as part of his research. The intensity of his “Son of a Gun” pursuit builds and builds. I won’t tell you the conclusion, but Gabe’s voyage of discovery is a hilarious journey and a tour de force of creativity.

In this era of looming uncertainty and instability, a literary romp may be just what the doctor ordered.