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Ronald Ruskin
Ronald Ruskin is a psychiatrist at Mount Sinai Hospital and associate professor and training and supervising analyst at Toronto Institute of Psychoanalysis. He has co-edited texts on psychotherapy supervision, as well as on humanities and medicine, such as his 2011 book Body and Soul. He is a founding editor of Ars Medica, a medical-humanities journal, published over forty-five stories in literary and medical journals, and written a thriller entitled The Last Panic, and The Analyst Who Laughed to Death, the tragic-comic story of a tormented analyst who never escaped childhood.
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Ruskin’s cerebral conspiracy thriller diagnoses the digital age as terminally ill.
Set largely within Manhattan Central Hospital, this sprawling novel follows psychiatrist Marc Toledano and his former patient, Dr. Leila Elfassi. Now a psychiatrist herself, Leila has taken on leadership of the department just in time to confront a disturbing rise in paranoid patients suffering from what appears to be an entirely new mental disorder. At first, the symptoms resemble familiar psychosis: agitation, delusions, rage, extreme fixations. But as the patients become violent, and unexplained attacks multiply including the brutal murder of a beloved hospital nurse—the narrative widens into an ambitious web of espionage, surveillance technology, online radicalization, and geopolitical intrigue stretching from New York to Montreal to Paris to Jerusalem. The novel’s strongest passages emerge from realistic depictions of the institutional collapse and emotional exhaustion affecting medical workers; emergency rooms overflow, psychiatric staff burn out, and hospital administrators prioritize digital “efficiency” over human connection. (“The ER is short staffed. This night, Kofi is the lone psych resident in emergency.”) The atmosphere is persistently anxious, especially in scenes where physicians struggle to distinguish ordinary mental illness from something darker and more systemic. The author clearly possesses deep knowledge of psychiatry and uses it to unsettling effect, particularly in discussions of mob psychology, algorithmic manipulation, and the erosion of social trust. The espionage plot involving sleeper agents, corporate corruption, and covert mind-control research adds momentum and genuine intrigue, even if the revelations occasionally strain plausibility. The narrative sometimes gets sidetracked by the sheer multitude of plot lines and political ideologies—characters deliver lengthy philosophical monologues on politics, trauma, capitalism, and technology, sometimes at the expense of narrative flow. But the novel is undeniably compelling; beneath the tangled plotting and heavy exposition, the work sounds a sincere alarm about the fragility of human connection in an era of technological overstimulation and ideological fracture. The final pages, moving from personal grief to apocalyptic ambiguity, will undoubtedly leave readers with a lingering sense of dread.
A hard-to-shake techno-paranoid fever dream about the collapse of truth, trust, and sanity in the digital age.
—Kirkus Reviews
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Publisher : Sphinx Books
Published : June 2026
Formats : Perfectbound, Digital Cloth with Dust Jacket, EPUB
Pages : 278
Size : 5.5 x 8.5 in or 216 × 140 mm 50 White
ISBN (hardcover) : 978-1-915952-75-2
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-915952-76-9
ISBN (EPUB): 978-1-915952-77-6
