Nicole Palermo
Nicole Palermo is an author of psychological suspense and contemporary fiction. Her stories explore memory, grief, identity, and the moments that change lives forever. Rather than relying on constant twists or high-speed action, her novels focus on ordinary people facing extraordinary emotional truths, with endings that invite readers to look back and see the story in a completely new light.
Growing up in New England has had a lasting influence on her writing. Small towns and wooded back roads are never just places. They carry history, secrets, and stories of their own, and always find their way onto the page.
Whether her novels unfold in rural communities or bustling cities, they are grounded in complex characters and the emotional consequences of their choices. They’re less about who committed a crime and more about the emotional damage of kept secrets and how people live with the stories they tell themselves.
Nicole independently publishes her work through Midnight Ocean Press and is the author of I Haven’t Been Myself, What Remains of Her, and Dark Fragments. She has additional novels and shorter fiction on the way.
When she isn’t writing, Nicole can usually be found with a book in hand or spending time with her husband, three children, and their three dogs.
Books
I Haven't Been Myself
Leah has spent years running from her past. She came to a small New England town to disappear.
She lives on the outskirts of its careful routines and weathered façades, intentionally avoiding attachment and scrutiny. The less anyone sees, the better.
But the past is not a place you leave behind. It settles into the bones and alters the way you move through the world.
When trust becomes unavoidable, Leah is forced to confront the version of herself she tried to bury. And as the walls she’s built begin to thin, a more dangerous question surfaces:
What if she isn’t the only one who remembers?
A literary psychological thriller about identity, shame, and the fragile architecture of self-preservation. Quietly unsettling and emotionally intimate, it explores the cost of disappearing and the risk of being truly seen.
What Remains of Her
Nadia wakes inside a crumbling 1970s mental institution with only fragments of memory and no clear understanding of how she got there. The doctors call her unstable. Her own mind offers conflicting evidence. She knows she is unwell. She also knows something about this place isn’t right.
As pieces of her former life begin to surface, Nadia struggles to separate illness from manipulation, memory from delusion. The more she remembers, the less certain she is that she wants to. Some truths feel dangerous. Others may be fatal.
The institution is meant to keep patients safe. Instead, it feels like a maze with no exits and no clear way to trust what she sees or feels. Every recovered memory raises a new question: is she uncovering the truth, or distorting it beyond recognition? And if her mind cannot be trusted, who can?
What began as treatment slowly becomes something more terrifying. The deeper Nadia digs, the harder it becomes to tell whether she is healing or unraveling.
Confronting her past may anchor her to reality. It may also destroy what remains of it.
What Remains of Her is a literary psychological thriller about fractured memory, unstable perception, and the thin line between protection and control. Perfect for readers who crave layered suspense, morally complex characters, and twists that unsettle long after the final page.
Dark Fragments
What you can’t remember can still change you.
Vera has always lived her life on her own terms. Carefree. A little reckless. But everything changes the day she wakes up in a hospital bed with no clear memory of what happened, no idea how her life unraveled so quickly.
Now, her recollections come in unreliable flashes, leaving her unsure what is real and what her mind is protecting her from. When the police require her to recover the missing pieces of the day that shattered her sense of self, Vera is forced to retrace the steps of a past she doesn’t want to remember.
The deeper she digs, the more unsettling the fragments become.
Relationships she thought she understood begin to fracture.
Old choices take on darker meaning.
And the woman she remembers being may no longer be someone she recognizes.
As the truth slowly comes into focus, Vera must decide how much of her past she is willing to reclaim, and what she’s willing to live with once she does.
Because some memories don’t just explain what happened.
Some could destroy the fragile new life she’s trying to build.