Don't speak of the abuse. Keep the usual silence

An acquaintance of mine, Jenny Milchman, has published a new mystery, The Usual Silence. Drawing on her own background Jenny has created an engaging new protagonist, a psychologist who treats troubled children.

Jenny writes that when she was nine years old and walking with her younger brother in her suburban town "I felt something from behind. A hand where it should not have been on my body." She didn't know what was happening but "something felt very, very wrong. Whoever was behind me continued to trail along at our heels. Not letting himself be seen. And not letting go."

The children ducked into a pet store where there was a clerk and pretended to browse until the man—it was a man—left. Back home Jenny told her parents who called the police. "I remember driving around in a cop car, although we never saw the man. I didn’t recall what he looked like well enough to give a reliable report. I now realize how lucky I am in many ways."

Jenny's new creation, Arles Shepherd, treats troubled children while struggling to recover from her own traumatic past, much of which she's lost over time. Jenny writes "Arles is a character who’s good at amplifying the voices of her clients, but struggles with speaking up for herself. It’s a daily battle for her, but one she intends to win. So she fights. Every day. And when the biggest danger of all appears, at the end of the story, she is ready.

"Arles had to fight bigger battles than I did, if such rankings should even be a thing. I admire her greatly for what she survived, just as I admire every survivor out there. And I think we all can play a role in encouraging each other to speak up."

Arles has set up a new kind of treatment center in the Adirondack mountains and The Usual Silence involves two mysteries. One is a ten-year-old local boy who has never spoken a word—or so his mother believes. The other is a twelve-year-old girl a couple hundred miles south who gets off the school bus one afternoon—and vanishes. No clues, no witnesses and the police are baffled. 

One of the many satisfactions of the book, and there are a great many, is how Jenny finally connects the events downstate with the center in the Adirondacks. She writes that her own memory as a menaced nine-year-old "lives on, decades later, as poison. It’s a there-but-for-the-grace-go-I memory for me. I think of those who have faced encounters that didn’t end so well. That’s maybe why I wrote my book. I wrote myself into it and what could’ve been if it hadn’t turned out as it did." Readers of The Usual Silence will be pleased it does.