Marialyce 's Reviews > The Silent Patient

In this book, Alex Michaelides poses the ultimate question. How can one offer a defense when one refuses to speak?.... and yet the book opens with this...“Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband.” Alicia, had it all, a loving husband, a great career, a witness to murder perhaps, a murderer herself perhaps. She was a darling of so many, loved, desired, and totally nuts! And yet, with Alicia reverting to a silent world how can one be sure of anything?

Enter Theo Faber, criminal psychotherapist, who is chomping at the bit to get a crack at Alicia. She's a challenge so when he lands his new job at the facility where Alicia is housed, he's all in to get to the bottom of things. Poor Theo, though is undergoing some issues in his private life. His wife Kathy seems to have picked up a bit of an outside interest so Theo is involved with figuring out where things are going especially as it seems it's moving in the wrong direction. Dear Theo has got his hands full for sure!

All this intrigue is handled quite nicely by the author. He weaves a tale so well that a web forms and we find ourselves ensnared in it branches. This book will toss you around on an open sea of emotions, making you question everything, and wander around in the snares of deceit and duplicity. It's a definite conundrum and the ending and perhaps all you thought was going on is turned topsy turvy making you realize that “Love that doesn't include honesty doesn't deserve to be called love.”

Jan and I read this gem together and decided that this new author needs to get busy and write some more puzzling mystifying thrillers. Happy to hear that this book will be turned into a movie. Let's hope Hollywood does not mess around with a really good story line and leave this book just as it is.
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