The Silent Patient

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This week MapYourMystery.com veers off the cozy mystery path briefly and reviews some not-so-cozy mysteries. They will include The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides, The Blood Runs Cold by Catherine Maorisi, For Better and Worse by Margot Hunt and The Last Time I Lied by Riley Sager. Hope you enjoy this little diversion. 

In The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides, Alicia Berenson was a successful painter and her husband Gabriel was a well known photographer. What caused her to shoot him him in the face five times.? No one knows because Alicia hasn’t spoken a word.

Psychotherapist Theo Faber wants to help a patient who has not spoken since she killed her husband six years prior. He applies for a job at the facility where Alicia is a patient in the hopes that he can break through her silence.

Because she had been an artist, he proposes art therapy, which had been tried by other therapists and failed miserably. Alicia acted out and even attacked another patient, so the therapists gave up on trying to help her and decided to just house her in the institution.

But Theo persists. He spends hours talking to Alicia, but she doesn't respond. When he is about to surrender to the idea that he cannot reach her, she gives him her diary. In it she details how she has been followed by a strange man, it escalates into standing outside her house for hours at a time, then everything unravels to a shocking conclusion.

 A slow burn to a shocking climax.