Dry Ice by Stephen White is his latest thinking man’s thriller to feature Dr. Alan Gregory and his nemesis and former patient, Michael McClelland. McClelland has escaped from a mental institution and is out to wreak vengeance on those he believes to be responsible for putting him there. This time, he is not working alone; he and his accomplices have learned the deepest, darkest secrets of the people whom he considers to have ruined his life, and they are using those secrets against his enemies in cunning and devious ways to destroy them. Secrets and the lengths people go to protect them from being revealed are a major theme of Dry Ice. It’s a book that’ll keep you reading late into the night, an uncommon thriller of psychological terrorism sure to please Stephen White’s many fans and garner him many more.

Dr. Alan Gregory, as a clinical psychologist, is in the business of listening to and keeping secrets. He has his share of them, himself, as do all of the main characters in Dry Ice, such as his wife, Lauren; his best friend, Sheriff Sam Purdy; and his former patient and current lawyer, Kirsten Lord. A secret from his past haunts has haunted him for years and tracked him like wolves:

When I was feeling especially drained my secrets were not just a looming cloud, but they chased me like a pack of wolves that smelled fatiguing prey. I was feeling weary a lot. I often smelled the stink of wolf.

The manipulative Michael McClelland is has little trouble convincing others to help him, like Kol Cruz, one of Gregory’s newest patients, who claims to suffer from nosebleeds and shows up in Alan’s waiting room covered with blood before an appointment. When the blood proves not to have come from a nosebleed and a drop of it is picked up on Alan’s shoe when he cleans up the mess, Alan finds himself falling deeper into McClelland’s trap without yet even realizing it. Then, Sam tells Alan the news that somehow McClelland escaped when he and other patients at the institution were getting brain scans:

“Somebody took off his metal restraints so he could get scanned. Somebody else was supposed to put on some plastic restraints, which apparently didn’t happen. At some point one of the guards counts his nutsos and he realizes that he’s short exactly one nutso. Michael McClelland was the missing one.”

One murder isn’t enough. When Alan gets suspicious after spotting McClelland’s calling card, a bandanna, tied to the door of his vacationing neighbor’s barn and lets himself in the back door to find a body hanging from the rafters, he learns McClelland also wants to frame him for this crime. On the surface, it seems to be a suicide - but the rafters are, as Purdy points out, over eighteen feet high, and the nearest ladder is nowhere near the dead person. Someone has been camping there, as well:

Michael McClelland had been sleeping two dozen steps from my front door. From my sleeping wife. From my playing daughter.