Recent Reads: The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides 
Publisher: Celadon Books
Publication Date: February 5, 2019 

 

Format: Harbdack/ Audible Audio
Source: Little Library find/ bought with Audible credit.

Rating:


Goodreads Synopsis: 

Alicia Berenson’s life is seemingly perfect. A famous painter married to an in-demand fashion photographer, she lives in a grand house with big windows overlooking a park in one of London’s most desirable areas. One evening her husband Gabriel returns home late from a fashion shoot, and Alicia shoots him five times in the face, and then never speaks another word.

Alicia’s refusal to talk, or give any kind of explanation, turns a domestic tragedy into something far grander, a mystery that captures the public imagination and casts Alicia into notoriety. The price of her art skyrockets, and she, the silent patient, is hidden away from the tabloids and spotlight at the Grove, a secure forensic unit in North London.

Theo Faber is a criminal psychotherapist who has waited a long time for the opportunity to work with Alicia. His determination to get her to talk and unravel the mystery of why she shot her husband takes him down a twisting path into his own motivations—a search for the truth that threatens to consume him....

The Silent Patient is a shocking psychological thriller of a woman’s act of violence against her husband—and of the therapist obsessed with uncovering her motive.

 Review: 

A few months ago, I found a lovely hardback of this book in a local little library and snagged it. It has been on my ‘to read’ list for a while and it got a lot of hype when it was released so I wanted to see what that was all about. I really didn't want to read the full synopsis or any comments about the book, since I know that thrillers can so easily be ruined by them, and I was so glad I didn't peek. 

The Silent Patient is about a woman accused of her husband’s murder, but no one know why she did it since she has not spoken since the murder. The book has some of her journal entries leading up to the accident, but most of the story is told from the point of view of a psychotherapist who placed himself in that path of the hospital she is in in order to be her doctor. So the story is essentially the doctor, Theo, trying to get her to talk to him and open up about why. 

The interesting part of this book is that while Alicia is sitting there not talking and Theo is patiently trying to help her, he life is in turmoil. His wife has been cheating and he has figured it out and it is driving him a bit mad as well. 

This book was so oddly, and wonderfully written, the twists, turns, and red herrings were so well done. I could feel what was coming but not in the way it was inevitably revealed. Suspicions were torn apart little by little and left with lingering questions of how that came together beautifully in the end. 

The only thing that I felt off-putting was the number of times the author mentioned things were Greek-like, Greek statues, used Greek references, one or two, fine, but one in almost every chapter was excessive and I felt I could have made a drinking game out of it because it was so frequent.  

Overall, this book was a wild ride that I couldn't put down. Once I started reading, I wanted to read more and more until I figured it out.