About the title
On the day Malcolm Crowe, a renowned child-psychology specialist, receives an award for outstanding achievement in pediatrics and service to Philadelphia, tragedy strikes. Vincent Gray, one of his former patients — once a sensitive, intelligent, caring, and vulnerable boy, now a grown, deranged psychopath — breaks into Crowe's apartment and, blaming the doctor for all his troubles, shoots him in front of his wife with a pistol before taking his own life. The story then follows Crowe as he tries to understand the cause of his therapeutic failure and throws himself into work, searching his notes for the key to what happened to Gray. His relationship with his beloved wife deteriorates as he unwittingly grows distant from her. The following autumn, Crowe takes on a new patient, eight-year-old Cole Sear, whose symptoms almost exactly match Gray's case history. Cole seems like a frightened, autistic boy. Crowe does everything he can to help him, sen