Hi guys!
I finished this brilliant thriller over the past weekend! It’s a recommendation from my bookfriend BookmarkThat and as usual her recommendations are exceptional. You can check her out on https://bookmarkthat.co.uk/ for more! I really enjoyed myself whilst reading this book and I think I might be persuaded to try more thrillers in the future. The synopsis is borrowed from Goodreads:
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.
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 must be the best psychological thriller I’ve read thus far! I haven’t read that many but its a genre I’ve come to appreciate so I’ll read more of them in the nearby future. As usual I’m horrible at guessing the ending, but what I really appreciated was that everything was revealed at a time that was so perfect it couldn’t be better timed! I was so engrossed by this book when I got into it that I struggled to put it down. I had even less time to think about the ending before i approached the end of the book. It literally kept me glued to the last page! There is a nice flow to the story which balance the more intense parts of it very nicely! We alter between Theo’s and Alicia’s perspective where Theo’s perspective is set to the present time of the book whereas Alicia’s is past time. This might seem weird but it also makes very much sense since Alicia don’t speak.
There is some really interesting characters in this book. I found Alicia to be the most intriguing one. I tried to figure out what kept her silent but that was truly difficult and it was masterly written by Michaelides! The way he managed to weave the story like he did truly takes an amazing author because the story is fairly simple yet complicated. Then there is Theo, our other main character. Uhm, yes…What a peculiar human being! I must say…this almost obsession like need to make Alicia talk again seemed very weird to me. I can somewhat understand the notion of helping someone in need but to almost obsess over it? It seems a bit much to me, I don’t know what you guys think tho. If you’ve read the book I’m more than happy to gossip about it! I found Theo’s techniques with Alicia very interesting. I was surprised by some and others seemed rather obvious even though I’m not trained in psychotherapy. We just learned a few techniques whilst I took my bachelor’s degree. Michaelides is not a psychotherapist himself but you would almost think him to be considering the details you find in this book. The way he describes the situations, the reactions, and the behavior is very to the point and detailed. I’m most impressed!
The Silent Patient is the one psychological thriller I really recommend that you push to the front of your TBR ASAP! You’ll be glued to the pages from the very beginning and you won’t be able to put it down. It’s the perfect Christmas gift for a bookworm who loves Psychological thrillers! I wouldn’t gift this to the younger readers but 18 and above should be fine. The reason for this is that there are some scenes in the book that may seem frightening to younger minds.
Published: 2019
Genre: Psychological thriller
Theme: Mental health, therapy, murder
– The Book Reader
TheBookReader 