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[katara]

Title: The Silent Patient

Author: Alex Michaelides

Genre: Mystery, Crime, Thriller, Suspense, Fiction, Psychological Thriller, Adult, Contemporary

Date Started: January 4th, 2023

Date Finished: January 6th, 2023

Status: Finished

Rating: 1.5/5

Sypnosis: 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: Once again another book that came highly recommended from the book reccs of BookTok. I even thought the premise made it sound interesting and I was eager to add this book to my TBR of 2023. Perhaps I should have added this book at the very bottom or maybe I should have listened to some of the other readers trying to steer me away from this book.

But I am stubborn and I always try to form my own opinions about a book regardless of whether they are good or bad. This one lays in between that. I cannot decide whether I enjoyed some of it or that the book was just weighed down by too much to give it any higher rating.

Alicia Berenson's life was destroyed one night when her husband was murdered and she blamed for the death. Once a prominent painter and now a shadow of herself locked away in an asylum. That is until a young man named Theo Faber decides to try to unlock the secrets of that night. Only do we learn that it is Theo that was the killer that night and he destroyed Alicia, not only by killing her husband but also by revealing that her happy marriage was nothing more than an illusion. Gabriel, Alicia's husband, was having an affair with Kathy, Theo's wife, and he decided that he was going to kill the guy. I don't know whether he harmed Kathy or not because we do see him brandishing a knife with her but in the next instant we see that she is perfectly okay, I guess?

This book had a lot of promise to it but the book was weighed down with way too much in between the storyline. I suppose fillers are meant to tie up the beginning, middle, and ending together like a nicely wrapped package but at the same time it was just way too much that I found myself not only putting the book down several times to pick up something else because I would become bored and cared less of what was going on. No matter how returned I found myself less enticed by the book that I ended up skimming over nearly half of the ending because I could not stand it.

I did feel a lot of sympathy for Alicia because she knew who Theo was and she knew that despite being drugged up she could not tell the others. Besides, who would believe her anyways? She was convicted of the murder and she had never spoken of the murder and now that the murderer was before her and he seemed to just want to see if she would ever talk about that night.

One thing I did not understand is why no one bothered to go through her diary. Did they not think that it was important? Did they think there was nothing more than ramblings of a lunatic who murdered her husband for no reason? And why introduce a diary if it really is nothing? Okay, so it did prove something in the end but that was the end. It was just - there during the entire storyline.

I just wasn't impressed with the characters nor the lengthy storyline.