THE TESTIMONY

Elena Vargas picked up the phone and ended her career to stop a killer. She broke therapist-patient privilege because a woman was going to die if she didn’t. It cost her license. It cost her reputation. It cost the belief that doing the right thing would protect her.

She thought that was the worst it could get.

Then his defense lawyer sent the subpoena. For the defense.

Now she has to sit fifteen feet from the man who confessed to her, in a polished wooden chair worn smooth by hundreds of hands, and answer every clinical question Gerald Fisk puts to her: the remorse she observed, the sleepless nights, the hands he scrubbed raw in her office while a mother she also treated kept asking what happened to her son.

Every word she said about his remorse is about to become the weapon that frees him.

She cannot lie. She cannot refuse.

Diane Hollowell will be in the third row, holding the spiral notebook with her dead son’s name on it, listening to the woman who once held her hand across a kitchen table describe the killer’s suffering in the language of compassion.

Every honest answer brings him closer to walking free. Every honest answer breaks the mother in the gallery.

The Testimony is a devastating courtroom thriller about the moment the truth you told to save a life becomes the truth that frees the person who took one, and the impossible cost of telling it under oath.

Book Two in the Hollowell Moral Thriller Series. The sequel to The Privilege.

For fans of Jodi Picoult, Lisa Scottoline, and Lynette Eason.