Rating: 2/5
Review:
Not for me
I wasn’t keen on The Silent Patient. To be fair, this is partly
because I don’t normally get on with psychological thrillers, but
the blurb led me to expect a rather more subtle, insightful book than
usual in the genre. I didn’t get it.
The set-up is well
explained in the blurb: Theo Faber is a psychotherapist who becomes
obsessed with treating/helping a woman who has not spoken for the six
years since she was convicted of killing her husband. There follows
an unconvincing plot with, inevitably A Huge Twist which, as is so
often the case, means sacrificing any credibility of plot or
character just to try to make the revelation a surprise to the
reader. Combined with a lot of glib psychotherapyspeak I’m afraid
it just made me cross. Add to this a faintly irritating writing
style which on occasion isn’t afraid of being both unrealistic and
using a clunking cliché at the same time (“I became resolved to
stop at nothing until Alicia became my patient”) and has a habit of
ending chapters with that Punchy Sentence technique, like “I
wondered why Christian was so positive I would fail. But it made me
even more determined to succeed.” which I began to wait for like
the next drop in the Water Torture. I was, frankly, glad to get to
the end.
Fans of the
psychological thriller have plainly enjoyed this far more than I did,
but personally I can’t recommend it.
(My thanks to Orion
for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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