Title: The Silent Patient

Author: Alex Michaelides

Publisher: Celadon Books 2019

Genre: Thriller

Pages: 336

Rating: 1/5 stars

Reading Challenges: Unread Shelf Project; Unread Shelf Project Reading Challenge - February

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....

Boring, boring, boring… and then I started to see all the plot holes and got really angry at the book. Even with the first chapter I was a bit bored with the story. I could see that we were getting an unreliable narrator and a mystery that probably wasn’t much of a mystery. All my fears for this book were confirmed about half way through. I got to the end of the book and wanted to just throw this book at the wall. I hated all the characters. I hated the plot. I hated how all the female characters were treated. I hated the giant black holes of plot inconsistencies. I can’t believe that this was one of the Book of the Month books of the year for 2019. Waste of my time.

Next up on the TBR pile: