Why You'll Love This
A psychiatrist who studies damaged minds makes exactly the kind of choices you'd expect him to diagnose in someone else — and the spiral is merciless.
- Great if you want: neo-noir psychology with real menace underneath
- The experience: slow-burn dread that tightens like a knot
- The writing: Nunn layers irony into his prose — Chance's clinical voice undercuts his reckless choices brilliantly
- Skip if: you need a morally grounded protagonist to stay engaged
About This Book
San Francisco forensic neuropsychologist Eldon Chance is the kind of man who understands the human mind far better than he understands himself. When a dangerously complicated patient draws him into a web of obsession, deception, and violence, the gap between his professional judgment and his personal choices becomes impossible to ignore. Kem Nunn's Chance is a psychological thriller that keeps its tension coiled and intimate — less concerned with whodunit than with watching a smart, decent man make one ruinous decision after another, and asking whether self-awareness can ever actually save us from ourselves.
What sets this novel apart is Nunn's prose, which carries the cool, clinical register of a man trained to observe while slowly letting that composure fray at the edges. The writing is precise where it needs to be and genuinely unsettling where it counts. Nunn builds dread incrementally, through atmosphere and character rather than plot mechanics, and the result feels closer to literary noir than genre thriller — morally murky, psychologically sharp, and quietly devastating in the way it renders a man coming undone in full view of the reader.