Recruited to replace a renowned psychiatrist who has mysteriously disappeared, Dr. Rachel Miller is plunged into the hectic world of psychiatry at a state-of-the-art clinic specializing in the treatment of dissociative identity disorder, also known as multiple personality disorder. When one of her patients commits suicide under suspicious circumstances, Rachel begins to question whether she has made the right career choice. Her doubts are soon replaced by fear as she suspects that her colleagues and their unorthodox methods of treatment are behind the violent suicide. Rachel's fears are shared by Ed Morgan, an insurance agent sent to assess the clinic's insurance needs, after he makes a startling discovery. Enlisting the aid of a patient, an enigmatic ex-CIA agent, and a tenacious FBI agent searching for the missing psychiatrist, Rachel and Ed dig deeper into the clinic's origins, only to discover that the clinic has as many secrets as its patients.
Steve is a French, Italian, Spanish and Canadian Wine Scholar, the only North American invited to join the Champagne Academy in France and is a member of International Thriller Writers. He has visited hundreds of wineries in the world's major wine regions.
During the pandemic, he worked the 2020 harvest to learn the winemaking process firsthand from the winemakers at Mission Hill Family Estate Winery in British Columbia. In 2021, he worked at Trius Winery in Niagara-On-The-Lake, Ontario where he put his winemaking and forklift-driving skills to use once again as a cellarman.
Kirkus Reviews called Steven Laine's first wine thriller, Root Cause, “An entertaining, wine-soaked mystery.” The Washington Post wrote; “If Michael Pollan and Dan Brown sat down over a bottle of Barolo and brainstormed a novel based on the neuroses of the natural wine movement, they might have come up with something like ‘Root Cause’.”