How can you know if someone stole your identity? Or if it still exists, how to retrieve it?

SafeSpace, totaling 78,160 words, is a medical/psychological thriller for adults about a mysterious epidemic of mental illness in a New England university town, and about Dr. Abby Belson, a freshly minted psychiatrist, who risks her life to end it. Her patient Drew, a loner tormented by urges and obsessed with his bearded dragon, and who survived an unsolved family massacre, can help her unravel the mystery if he doesn’t kill her first. At the hub of the enigma stands the university’s SafeSpace, a special mental health unit in which treatments are never what they seem.

A tale of the medical manipulation of the human psyche and of literal identity theft, this novel is as current and relevant as our daily headlines. It should appeal to adult fans of medical or psychological thrillers and mysteries in medical settings; and those interested in psychiatry, especially mentally ill protagonists who struggle to overcome their problems despite an inimical healthcare system and society; and fans of fiction that reveals corruption and crime in our most respected institutions and depicts underdogs who challenge the establishment, especially in the fields of medicine and science.
Readers may most closely compare SafeSpace with the novels of Freida McFadden—The Inmate and Brain Damage in particular—and Brandon Graham’s Half Dead.

A practicing, Board-certified psychiatrist, S.P. Goldsmith authored the nonfiction book, The Healing Paradox:A Revolutionary Approach to Treating and Curing Physical and Mental Illness (North Atlantic Books, 2013). This is his debut novel.

Complete manuscript is available.

STORY INSPIRATION: “Initially I wanted to explore through a thriller format a major problem of our era, the loss of identity, especially among young adults. As I read about technologies designed to accelerate this loss—human chip implants, sex robots, virtual reality headsets—I developed the medical substrate for my story. The emergence of the COVID lockdowns, masks, and vaccine mandates in 2020 inspired me to address in my novel the abuse of authority and corruption of institutions that increasingly taint medicine.”