Insanely Committed

by Matthew Granahan

Jack Falco is the Daily Herald’s ace investigative reporter until he gets busted back to obituaries for insubordination and refusal to follow his assignments. He stews there plotting his revenge by looking for a new job while mindlessly pounding out obits until he notices a strange pattern of deaths coming from Greyrock, the local mental hospital. Nobody seems to notice that an inordinate number of patients with no living relatives are suddenly dying. Falco, the enterprising reporter, decides to check it out. When he visits the hospital chapel for one of the funeral services, several patients hastily whisper to him tales of strange doings by the mysterious and remote head of psychiatry.Are they on the level or just engaging in crazy talk? Falco intends to find out. Exhausting traditional journalistic methods, he hatches a plan with the help of his editor, who is now convinced that Falco is onto something, to go undercover as a patient to find out the unlikely truth. It is a secretive and dangerous mission. The dark and funny horrors of the state lunatic asylum are gradually revealed both to Falco and the reader as he goes on an archetypal passage into those depths.What Falco discovers is beyond his wildest imaginings. Is the chief psychiatrist an evil genius or just evil? Has he cured the most intractable of psychotics? Have these patients touched the face of God or are they just touched? Falco is swept into a maelstrom of chaos and conflict as he falls in love, becomes subject to the scheming medical staff and finds himself swayed by the most seductive of experiences while fighting for his own life—as well as trying to reveal to an unwitting public a truth too frightening for words.

348 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 4, 2012

Reviews

[Anne Mouse · Rating 4 out of 5]

It turned out to be a good read as a journalist gets deeper and deeper into his story until he is committed in the mental hospital he is investigating. Now he has to get his story and get out before he really is mad.