A forensic psychiatrist. A mute patient accused of three ritualistic murders. An interview room with two chairs and a truth that will destroy everything.

Dr. Markus Ehler has spent fifteen years evaluating violent offenders for the state of Baden-Württemberg. He has been bitten once, threatened eight times, and lied to in every session. He considers himself good at his work. When he is assigned to evaluate a silent, seemingly catatonic patient known only as The Gardener, a man accused of killing three women and arranging their bodies in a forest with flowers in their hands, Markus approaches the case with the clinical precision that has defined his career.

But the patient begins to speak. And what he says is unsettling, not because it is disturbing, but because it is familiar. His voice is too close to Markus’s own. His observations are too accurate. His knowledge of the murders extends beyond what any case file contains. Session by session, the interviews become something Markus did not anticipate: not an evaluation, but a mirror.

As the scent of linden, the same botanical compound used to kill the three women, begins following Markus from the interview room to his office, to his clothes, to his skin, the boundary between psychiatrist and patient starts to dissolve. His colleagues watch with growing concern. His notes become repetitive. He stops eating. He stops sleeping. He stops going home. And the question he carries into every session shifts from What does The Gardener want? to something far more dangerous.

Set in the forensic psychiatric facilities of southern Germany, THE LINDEN SESSIONS is a literary thriller that reveals its true nature only on the final pages, and then demands to be read again. What begins as a clinical cat-and-mouse becomes something rarer and more devastating: a novel about the stories we construct to survive ourselves, and the moment those stories can no longer hold.

The first book in The Schwarzwald Cycle. For readers of Tana French, Alex Michaelides, and Paul Tremblay.