Suicide Department

Clarissa Simms is good at death. As a suicide evaluator for the federal government, she has spent ten years in a tiny, unassuming office with a door behind her—one she alone has the power to open. Through it pass those she deems eligible for government-sanctioned death. What lies beyond, even she doesn't know. And she's never questioned it. Until now. When a man she denies suicide benefits takes his own life, Clarissa—normally precise, detached, and unshakable—begins to unravel. Not only because he broke the ultimate taboo by killing himself himself, but because she recognizes something in his suffering. What follows is a surreal collapse of Clarissa's carefully constructed identity and the haunting revelation of where the door she guards may lead. As Clarissa disappears, a tangle of lives also begins to unravel: Esther Robles, grieving and furious after her grandfather's cruel demise from cancer, finds herself drawn into Clarissa's mystery after receiving a strange gift. Abraham, a quiet government worker and Clarissa's only friend, discovers the depth of his love for her—just as she vanishes. Angel, a disaffected teenager, is changed forever when her grandfather takes matters into his own hands. Hovering over them all are the architects of the suicide evaluator program and a ruthless lobbyist bent on turning death into a billion-dollar business. As factions vie for control of Clarissa's power and the truth behind the door, the line between life and death, service and self-destruction, becomes terrifyingly thin. Suicide Department is a dark literary novel (with a speculative injection) about the lies we tell ourselves to survive, and the machinery—both personal and political—that profits from our pain. It asks: If you could open the door out of suffering, would you? And what would it cost to come back?