RESURRECTION KILL
by Laura Joh Rowland
October 19 – November 13, 2026 Virtual Book Tour
Synopsis:
An amnesic psychiatrist returns to the hospital where she was institutionalized as a teen to find answers, perfect for fans of The Silent Patient and Shutter Island.
Forgetting can be dangerous. Remembering can be fatal.
New York State, 1953. Dr. Claire Kendall is a psychiatrist-in-training at Resurrection Kill Hospital, a luxurious private and isolated mental institution for the wealthy. But under her mask of professionalism, Claire has a secret: She was a patient at the hospital when she was fourteen.
With gaps in her memory, Claire is determined to discover what really happened the summer she was institutionalized… even if it means uncovering the dangerous secrets hiding at Resurrection Kill. Before long, Claire takes a special interest in a teenage patient, Rory Kirkpatrick, a free-spirited girl who is also determined to uncover Resurrection Kill Hospital’s dark past. Claire indulges Rory’s rebellious nature, hoping to glean clues that might help in her own search for the truth.
But the hunt for answers triggers flashbacks of Claire’s painful childhood, her father’s cruelty, her mother’s alcoholism, her beloved older brother’s death. The deeper she probes her own past, the more she remembers about the summer that changed everything. And as she delves deeper into her own mind, she’ll come to find that her sanity grows more fragile by the day and that some secrets are meant to stay buried. She’ll discover that remembering may come at the cost of her life.
Praise for Resurrection Kill:
“Resurrection Kill by Laura Joh Rowland is everything I love in a thriller: intriguing and chilling, vivid and memorable, a compelling and deeply personal story about one woman’s search for answers in an era when women were committed to mental hospitals for virtually anything that was outside the cultural norm. That Resurrection Kill Hospital is an upscale facility for the super rich only makes the procedures the women are subjected to all the more barbaric. Claire’s courage and fearlessness under increasingly dangerous circumstances made me want to stand up and cheer. I loved this book!”
~ Karen Dionne, author of #1 international bestseller The Marsh King’s Daughter and The Wicked Sister
Book Details:
Genre: Historical Fiction; Thriller/Suspense
Published by: Crooked Lane Books
Publication Date: October 27, 2026
Number of Pages: 336 HC
ISBN: 9798892427111
Book Links: Amazon | Kindle | Barnes & Noble | BookShop.org | Goodreads | BookBub | Penguin Random House
Read an excerpt:
New York State, July 1953
A siren blares through the loudspeaker in the conference room where I sit with the four other new psychiatrists. A staticky voice repeats, “Code 1, East Drive.” Startled, we look to the man at the head of the table.
Tall, dignified, and silver-haired, Superintendent Adrian Van Pelt raises his voice over the siren. “Welcome to your first day as residents at Resurrection Kill Hospital.” His manner is calm, faintly amused, his black suit impeccably tailored. “You might as well see what you’re getting into.”
Beckoning, he strides out the door. We hurry after him along the wide hall, down the grand staircase. In the foyer, one resident catches up with Superintendent Van Pelt and opens the door. With his blond crewcut and conventional handsomeness, he looks like a movie star. The only other woman besides myself trots at his heels. She’s bespectacled, her reddish-brown hair coiled in a bun, and her skirt stretches across wide hips. I lag behind the other men. One is slender and older than the rest of us, his hairline receding; shadows underscore his deep-set eyes. The other looks Japanese, with straight black hair and an upright posture that adds to his less than average height. My colleagues are eager beavers, but I hesitate. I should join the front of the charge because first impressions are lasting, and my career depends on the success of my residency; I mustn’t look timid. But I need to avoid close attention.
This is my colleagues’ first day here. But not mine.
Twelve years ago, when I was fourteen, I was a patient at Resurrection Kill Hospital.
The people with me don’t know. Nobody must ever know.
The heavy carved door set with stained glass starts to swing shut in my face. The others are already outside, and the Japanese-looking man holds it open for me. He’s the only person who noticed that I’ve lagged behind. I take a deep breath, walk through the door, nod my thanks at him, and emerge into bright sunshine. The warm summer air smells of roses and freshly cut grass. I pause on the steps of the mansion that serves as the administration building. Around me as far as I can see spreads the hospital’s campus, located five miles from Resurrection—the town from which it took its name—and about fifty miles upstate from New York City. Kill is the Dutch word for a stream, and the campus nestles in a curve of Resurrection Kill, a tributary of the Hudson River. Founded in 1885, the hospital was built by an architect inspired by Frederick Law Olmstead, designer of Central Park and other landmark sites. Buildings constructed mostly in the nineteenth century, in various styles, cluster together at the middle of a hundred and thirty acres of gently rolling hills landscaped with gardens and surrounded by woods. I don’t recognize anything, which disappoints but doesn’t surprise me.
The five months I spent here in 1941 are a black void in my memory, lit only by occasional, disturbing flashbacks. I returned to complete my training but also to reconstruct my past. I became a psychiatrist because I want to help the mentally ill, but I also need to find out what happened to me here and why I forgot it all.
I catch up with Superintendent Van Pelt and the other residents on the main road that winds through the campus. Red-brick buildings from the Victorian era, separated by lawns and gardens, line the road. People who look to be patients or visitors stroll in the gardens. Yesterday, I had planned to arrive in time to move into my quarters, take a walk before dark, and search for scenes that evoke memories, but the drive from the city took longer than I expected due to heavy traffic, and my car had a flat tire. After getting the car towed and the tire fixed at a garage, I reached the hospital too late to explore the campus. Now I lift my gaze to the treetops, to the slate roofs of other buildings, to the smokestacks that rise from a power plant to the cloudless blue sky. It’s as if I’ve never been here before. I focus on Superintendent Van Pelt, at the head of our little parade. He moves with a rapid, athletic gait, as if the passage of his sixty years has diminished neither his strength nor his energy. I think I remember him, but perhaps my mind is filling the void with false memories.
The sounds of automobile horns and racing engines interrupt my thoughts. A male voice shouts through a megaphone: “Stop!” We round a curve in the road. A dark green pickup truck speeds toward us, followed by a white sedan. A second white sedan comes from the opposite direction, on a collision course with the truck. I gasp, bracing myself for the crash. The other residents exclaim in alarm. Brakes screech as the second sedan slews around to block the road. The green truck veers to avoid hitting the sedan and comes straight at us. We scatter out of its way. The truck jumps the curb, rolls over grass, and crunches to a halt. Rakes, shovels, and buckets rattle in its bed. On the road, the first sedan stops near the second. Both have the hospital’s insignia—an oak tree spreading limbs over the letters RKH—and the word “Security” printed in green on the doors. The drivers, men clad in dark green uniforms, spring from the cars. They rush to the truck, whose front wheels have plowed over a ring of stones and low bushes that surround a flowerbed. The truck’s back wheels spin, churning up grass and dirt as its driver guns the engine. The flowerbed, bright with pink, mauve, and blue hydrangeas, is set in the lawn in the curve of a semicircular drive. The drive fronts a building, three stories of red brick and white-framed windows, the roof ornate with gables, dormers, and chimneys. A sign outside reads, “Serenity House.”
Could it be where I lived when I was a patient?
Nurses in white dresses and caps and orderlies in blue uniforms run out of the building and flock around the truck. The security guards are trying to open the truck’s doors, which are locked. One guard says, “It’s Rosemary Kirkpatrick. She sneaked out of Haven House and stole a groundskeeper’s truck.”
“Rosemary is a problem patient,” Superintendent Van Pelt informs our band of residents.
A guard strikes the truck’s passenger side window with his truncheon. The glass breaks. A shrill voice screams from inside the vehicle: “Go away, you bastards!”
The truck’s engine revs; the wheels spin faster, in vain. The guard reaches through the broken window, unlocks and opens the door. The engine dies as he turns the key in the ignition. He and his partner reach inside the truck and pull Rosemary Kirkpatrick out. She flails so wildly that all I can see of her is a tangle of thin limbs, pink garment, and long, dark hair. Shrieking curses that would put a sailor to shame, she kicks one guard in the groin. He howls and doubles over. She pulls free of the other guard, leaving the ripped sleeve of her dress in his hands, and runs . . . straight to me.
My heart clenches. Rosemary’s face is small, her features delicate, her complexion pale within the frame of unruly black hair. She’s just a girl, no more than sixteen or seventeen.
Everyone else is in motion—guards, nurses, and orderlies chasing Rosemary; the other residents backing away from her; Superintendent Van Pelt raising his hand, opening his mouth to issue commands. But Rosemary’s gaze snares mine, and I’m rooted to the spot. It’s as if she’s singled me out of the crowd, with some primal instinct that sensed—what? A sympathetic ally? A fellow mental case? She clutches my arms, her fingers hard against the gabardine of my suit jacket, digging into my flesh. Her eyes are wide, startlingly green, and fringed with long black lashes.
“Help me!” she cries.
I instinctively grasp her arms—whether to break her hold on me or to try to soothe her, I don’t know. Her arms are thin but strong. Her anguish strikes a deep chord in me.
“Get me out of here!” she begs. “Please!”
My lips move involuntarily, and my mind echoes with the sound of my own voice crying out the same words. An eerie shiver ripples through me. The scene around me blurs, and my heart drums hard and fast through a tide of vertigo. Locked together, Rosemary and I seem to spin a hundred and eighty degrees, switching places. The nurses and orderlies are after me, not her. I see us from a vantage point high above—her dark-haired and half-naked in the tatters of her pink dress; myself with a brown pageboy, trim gray suit, and black pumps. I forget which of us is the doctor, which is the fugitive inmate. A flash of memory like a lightning bolt illuminates the dark void.
I once accosted some stranger in my own desperate attempt to escape this hospital.
The orderlies yank Rosemary away from me, and our hands cling together for one last instant. Mouth wide with terror, she looks like she’s drowning and a riptide is pulling her away from her rescuer. I feel the same expression on my own face, as if we are mirror images. Please don’t let them take me back there! I don’t want to go!
“Calm down, Rosemary, that’s a good girl,” Superintendent Van Pelt says, his gentle, firm tone laced with condescending tolerance.
Rosemary screams as the orderlies wrestle her to the ground. A guard speaks into a walkie-talkie. The other residents look on with stoic expressions that mask whatever excitement or alarm they may be feeling. I rearrange my own face to match theirs as I take deep breaths to quell my panic.
The superintendent walks over to the fray, confident as a zookeeper accustomed to wild beasts. A nurse places a hypodermic syringe in his hand. While the orderlies hold Rosemary down, he stabs the needle into her thigh and pushes the plunger. Her screams dwindle to whimpers; the fight goes out of her. Her eyes roll up inside her head, and her body relaxes into drugged sleep. The orderlies step back, panting and wiping sweat off their brows. Superintendent Van Pelt gives the syringe back to the nurse and dusts off his hands. An ambulance arrives. The attendants bring a gurney, lift the unconscious Rosemary onto it, strap her down, and load her into the ambulance.
“I’ll see her back to the ward,” Superintendent Van Pelt tells our group of residents. “Wait for me in the conference room.”
He climbs into the passenger seat of the ambulance and rides away. We retrace our steps to the administration building, the handsome blond man first, the other woman a step behind him; then the thin older man; then the Japanese-looking man and me, walking together.
“Are you all right?” My companion sounds concerned; he noticed my distress.
My cheeks warm. The other residents seem oblivious, and I’m glad he spoke quietly and didn’t call their attention to me. “I’m fine.”
I’m shaken and trembling inside, but my voice is cool, calm, the product of training and discipline. I can’t afford to seem weak, lest the others shun me out of contempt. Triumph revives my strength. I’ve started to remember. Just as I’d hoped, coming back to Resurrection Kill Hospital has cracked open the void. After twelve years, light is shining through. I look from side to side and backward, eager to see what else might be revealed.
In the flowerbed that Rosemary Kirkpatrick drove the truck into is a statue of a woman. Her stone skin is green with moss, her face hidden by ivy. What would she see if the ivy were torn away? Would she rather remain blind and ignorant?
***
Excerpt from Resurrection Kill: A Novel by Laura Joh Rowland. Copyright 2026 by Laura Joh Rowland. Reproduced with permission from Laura Joh Rowland. All rights reserved.
Author Bio:
Laura Joh Rowland is the award-winning author of the Sarah Bain Victorian Mystery series, the samurai detective Sano Ichirō mystery series set in seventeenth-century Japan, and a historical suspense series starring Charlotte Brontë. Her work has been published in twenty-one countries; nominated for the Anthony Award, the Hammett Prize, and the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award; won RT Magazine‘s Reader’s Choice Award; and been included in the Wall Street Journal‘s list of the five best historical mystery novels. Laura holds a bachelor of science and a master of public health degree from the University of Michigan. She is a former aerospace scientist, a painter, and a cartoonist. She lives in New York City with her husband Marty.
Catch Up With Laura Joh Rowland:
LauraJohRowland.com
Amazon Author Profile
Goodreads
BookBub – @laurajohrowland
Instagram – @laurajohrowland
Facebook – @laurajohrowlandauthor
Q&A with Laura Joh Rowland
What was the biggest challenge you faced in beginning your writing career?
I didn’t know how to write a novel! I was a scientist with degrees in microbiology and public health, a job in the aerospace industry, and nothing but a burning desire to write and publish mystery fiction. But when you have such a burning desire to do something, you figure it out and get it done.
How did you come up with the title?
Resurrection Kill is the mental hospital in the book. “Resurrection” is the name of the town. “Kill” is the Dutch word for a stream, which flows around the hospital. The title reflects the themes of the story: The past is resurrected, patients are resurrected from mental illness into health, and the results are deadly.
Tell us why readers should pick up your book—what makes it stand out?
It’s the book I always wanted to read—a thriller in which the danger is as much psychological as physical, starring a heroine who confronts the darkness of her past while pursuing a career in a profession that’s hostile toward women, and braving situations that are more perilous than a meth lab full of drug dealers. I hope it’s the book you always wanted to read!
What do you absolutely need around you while writing?
I always have a favorite book to keep me company. It’s often a book from my youth. Right now it’s Double Date, a teen romance by Rosamond DuJardin.
If your novel were made into a movie, who would you cast in the main role?
I would go back in time and cast Lauren Bacall as Dr. Claire Kendall. It would be a black-and-white, classic noir movie with shades of The Snake Pit and The Bell Jar.
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When I first had the idea to write a novel, I had two kids under the age of 5 and worked full-time as an infectious diseases physician. Between school drop-offs, soccer practices, and a demanding job that had me working late nights and weekends, I had little free time. If I was lucky, I snuck an hour of writing in, a few times a week, usually late at night after the kids went to sleep. I developed an elaborate system of notebooks and sticky notes to warehouse my ideas. The notebooks were stashed everywhere (purse, car, nightstand). I jotted ideas down in my notebook and transferred them to sticky notes when I got home. The sticky note went on the window near my desk which served as a makeshift inspiration board. Two things you will never find missing from my desk: a notebook and a stack of sticky notes!
