Preventive Medicine
Formats: E-Book, Paperback
Ages: 18+
Pennie Doeth has spent her entire adult life trying to outrun violence. After surviving a brutal sexual assault as a teenager and years trapped in abusive relationships, she finally finds stability in suburban Michigan with her husband, Micah, an FBI agent, and their six-year-old daughter, Justice. To everyone around her, Pennie is the picture of composure: a respected Home Depot manager, devoted mother, loving wife, and mentor to women recovering from trauma. But beneath her calm exterior lives a rage shaped by years of pain, silence, and the realization that the men who destroyed lives like hers rarely face true consequences.
When a string of savage murders begins targeting violent men across Detroit, law enforcement fears a serial killer is emerging. The victims are drug dealers, predators, abusers, and men accused of hurting women, each killed with terrifying precision. As Micah joins a multi-agency task force hunting the unknown murderer, Pennie listens carefully from across the dinner table, hiding a horrifying secret: she is part of a clandestine pact formed between trauma survivors who believe they are delivering justice where the system failed. By day, Pennie attends PTA meetings, teaches Krav Maga, and comforts victims at a support group. By night, she becomes something far more dangerous.
But vengeance comes with a cost. As the investigation closes in, paranoia fractures the fragile alliance between Pennie and the other women involved in the killings. Mistakes are made. Loose ends emerge. Friends become threats. Forced to protect the life she treasures most, Pennie begins making darker and darker choices, all while Micah unknowingly hunts the woman sleeping beside him. Their marriage becomes a battlefield where love, loyalty, morality, and survival collide in devastating ways.
Dark, emotionally charged, and psychologically gripping, this is a story about trauma, justice, and the monsters created when pain is left unanswered. At its heart is a terrifying question: if the world refuses to protect the vulnerable, what happens when survivors decide to protect themselves?
Reviews
Loved the book! It is amazing. Pennie, Zoey and April....all survivors of trauma in their past. Woman finding how strong they can be. But what does it cost them to fight back and take control, and to protect those that cannot protect themselves? Micah, Pennie's FBI husband is working the case of multiple murders of men, all bad seeds, but Penni's secret life is about to cross paths with her husband investigation. Will he do what's right or what's right by his wife?
There is a specific dread that *Preventive Medicine* manufactures with quiet expertise: not the fear of the killer, but the fear of understanding her completely. Pennie Doeth is a survivor by any measure — of assault, of abuse, of a system that responded to her pain with paperwork and indifference. By the time we meet her, she has rebuilt herself into something formidable: devoted mother, respected professional, trauma mentor. She is also, on alternating evenings, participating in the methodical killing of violent men across Detroit. The novel's central tension is not whether she will be caught, but whether she should be. That is genuinely uncomfortable territory, and author handles it without flinching or cheating. Pennie is neither monster nor martyr. Her rage is earned, her logic is coherent, and her love for her daughter Justice is achingly real — which makes her escalating choices all the more devastating to watch. When the clandestine alliance of survivors begins fracturing under pressure, the paranoia that sets in feels less like thriller mechanics and more like tragedy. The marriage at the story's center is its most devastating element. Micah is not a villain; he is a good man hunting his wife across the dinner table, and the novel milks that dramatic irony with precision rather than melodrama. Their scenes together accumulate a quiet horror that lingers long after the plot's more explosive turns. *Preventive Medicine* belongs to a recent tradition of thrillers that refuse to let readers off the hook — books that make you root for someone and then force you to sit with what that rooting means. It is dark, psychologically rigorous, and deeply human. Not comfortable reading. Absolutely necessary.
