In Hysteria, Elisabeth de Mariaffi explores the issue of memory repressed and even altered with psychotropic drugs. It is 1956 and Heike Lerner is living in a quiet rural setting in upstate New York with her husband Eric and son Daniel. Eric is a doctor, a researcher whose areas of expertise are the mind and the development of new drugs and treatments for mental disorders. Heike’s past is tragic and traumatic: a German refugee who as a child narrowly escaped the fire-bombing of Dresden by walking for months through the forest, finally making her way into Switzerland, but along the way losing her younger sister Lena who had accompanied her. Her past also includes a brief previous marriage. As far as she can remember, she met Eric in Switzerland while recovering from the accident that killed her first husband and left her gravely injured. They married and Eric brought her to America to start a life together. Now, however, cracks are beginning to show in her recollections and in her life with Eric. Heike dotes on her son but is finding Eric increasingly distant, consumed by his work, and more controlling than in the past. More often than not she is doing as he asks not out of respect and love, but to avoid his displeasure. Because of the atrocities she witnessed during the war (today her condition would likely be recognized as PTSD), Heike suffers from sleeplessness and extreme mood swings, and Eric is in the habit of treating her "hysteria" with draughts and tinctures that he prepares himself, which, as her trust in him erodes, she avoids taking through subterfuge. One night at a party Heike lingers too long in the company of their host, Dolan, a television script writer, and Eric leaves without her. Afterward, Dolan drives her home, but when she gets there she discovers that Daniel is gone. The story that de Mariaffi constructs from this point proceeds at a breakneck pace, loaded with twists and turns, false leads and shocking revelations. Heike, stunned by Eric’s hostile response to her fears for her son's safety and amazed by the apparent lack of police interest in Daniel’s disappearance, conducts a haphazard search of her own, which takes her deep into her own murky past. Hysteria is a complex and cleverly constructed story in which very little is as it appears on the surface, including the motivations of the main players. de Mariaffi is a disciplined writer who works with precision and subtlety, parceling out the clues with maddening restraint. This is a novel that pulls the reader in, not only through sheer force of its storytelling, but also with the language, which evokes remote times and places gracefully and with a level of detail that is often astounding. The book is filled with memorable phrases and arresting visuals. The book’s weaknesses are its excessive length and duplication of some of the situations in which Heike finds herself, the effect of which is to blunt the dramatic impact, dilute the level of suspense and somewhat test the reader’s patience. Still, in Hysteria Elisabeth de Mariaffi has written a genuinely creepy page turner that again and again blows the reader’s expectations out of the water. ( )