[REVIEW] The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides #TheSilentPatient @orionbooks #BreakTheSilence

The Silent Patient will be the leading psychological thriller of 2019 – I mean it already is. While writing this review I’m happy to say that the US version of the book is already out and the UK comes out tomorrow (7^th). The Silent Patient is a book that surprised me in a good way and didn’t have that cliché psychological thriller stuff in it [I’ll discuss this in the review].

The Silent Patient introduces us to Theodore Faber, a forensic/criminal psychotherapist, who gets a job at a facility that helps mentally ill criminals. Theo has a goal set in mind when it comes to taking this job  and it’s finding out why the mysterious artist Alicia Berenson killed her husband Gabriel and after the murder stopped speaking. Theo is determined to find out what lead to the murder and being that he’s a psychotherapist he begins his search with a Freudian approach where the therapist delves into patient’s past to find out if the past has influenced the present in any way. The book is told from two voices – we have Theo and we have Alicia Berenson’s diary/journal – which makes you get the full picture of the story.

This book is a fast-paced one and I read two-hundred-and-fifty pages of it in a day! When I say fast-paced I truly mean it because the author doesn’t bother you with over-description or long sentences that wander off into nowhere, everything is there to keep your attention. After doing a bit of googling of Alex Michaelides I found out that he wrote a few movie scripts and The Silent Patient felt like one – I can definitely picture it on the big screen. What I most appreciated was how focused the book was on its events and there weren’t any scenes that dragged so that’s a plus in my book! Towards the end of the book I did manage to figure out what exactly happened but still the shock was there – very clever! I also appreciated the ending because I found it satisfying and well done which not many psychological thrillers manage to do [at least ones I’ve read]. Michaelides managed to include some psychology into this story which was awesome!

The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides shows us that even though we’ve seen many psychological thrillers over the years there’s always that one that manages to surprise us and we end up thoroughly enjoying it.

I would like to thank the publisher Orion Publishing for providing me with a review copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All opinions written here are my own and weren’t influenced by anything.

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Image taken from Goodreads.

Born in Cyprus to a Greek-Cypriot father and English mother, I studied English literature at Cambridge University and got my MA in screenwriting at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. I wrote the film The Devil You Know (2013) starring Rosamund Pike and co-wrote The Con is On (2018), starring Uma Thurman, Tim Roth, Parker Posey and Sofia Vergara. THE SILENT PATIENT is my first novel.

Find him on: Publisher’s website, Goodreads and Twitter.