The Therapist by B. A. Paris- Book Review

Title: The Therapist

Author: B. A. Paris

Publisher: HarperCollins

Publish Date: January 2021

Rating: 4/5

Summary(blurb): When Alice and Leo move into a newly renovated house in The Circle, an exclusive gated community, it is everything they've dreamed of. But appearances can be deceptive... 

As Alice is getting to know her neighbours, she discovers a devastating secret about her new home, and begins to feel a strong connection with the therapist who lived there before. Alice becomes obsessed with trying to piece together what happened. But no one wants to talk about it. And her neighbours are hiding something... 

The million-copy Sunday Times bestselling author B A Paris returns to her heartland of gripping psychological suspense in this powerful tale of a house that holds a shocking secret.

**This book review may contain spoilers**

After reading The Freedom Writers Diary, I asked my friends for some book recommendations, and this book is the first one I received. My friend lent this to me a few days ago-- and I speed-read it in two sittings. The Therapist is a captivating thriller revolving around the murder of the previous homeowner, and presents an unexpected twist at the end.

The Therapist follows Alice, who has just moved with her partner Leo into a London house in The Circle, a gated community (meaning nobody unauthorized can get in or out). Although Alice doesn't know it at first, she discovers that the previous owner was murdered in the house two years ago (which Leo knew about, but didn't tell Alice). It turns out the previous owner's name was Nina, which happens to be Alice's sister's name (who has died tragically), and so Alice gets very invested into Nina's murder. With the help of a private investigator, Alice starts playing detective and asks around about the murder every chance she gets. However, since it's a gated community, everyone else in the community are friends-- and they're all hiding something from Alice. Alice soon becomes obsessed, suspecting nearly everyone she can. The mysterious presence she keeps feeling at night adds to her obsession, and she keeps digging... but then it gets too dangerous. 

This psychological/domestic thriller was quite a page-turner, with a gripping plotline and large cast of characters. The main character Alice is an extreme extrovert, determined to meet and make friends however possible. The downside is that she puts too much trust in too many people, giving many of her friends important but unnecessary information. Which is a bad idea, since Alice finds out people are lying to her about the murder, and even explicitly gets a warning not to trust anyone. Additionally, Alice isn't the brightest character ever-- she doesn't follow up on a lot of quite important clues, forgetting all about them, while completely trusting the information from every source she gets unless it's directly contradictory to what she heard before. She's quite gullible, even later mentioning that she 'played right into [the murderer's] hands', as she had been easily led astray by a few red herrings. 

In addition to the main plotline, there were brief scenes of a therapist talking to patients sprinkled throughout the book (six to be exact). Honestly I forgot about most of them since they weren't immediately relevant to the plot, and only the last therapy session directly tied to the story.  They were also few and far between, so they didn't feel related to the plot at all. It was only when I finished the book and went back to those specific therapy scenes that I was able to piece it together. 

The scenes given were very mysterious, written from first person perspective so the reader won't even know which gender the character is (since it's 'I' and 'me' instead of 'he' or 'she'). 

Although The Therapist was an effortless read that kept me captivated with its plot and unexpected twist, one drawback was that the plot was quite drawn out and needlessly busy-- by which I mean that there were a lot of scenes where Alice doesn't find out anything interesting, just living normally and socializing and chatting with her neighbors about unimportant things. Although this was probably done to make the characters seem more realistic and come to life, it didn't accomplish much of that-- mostly because the main character was already shown as not being the brightest, and she was trying to find out more information on the murder however she could. These moments just spurred me on further into the book, waiting for when Alice would uncover more clues, which she didn't know if she could trust at all. 

Another aspect that I found a little lacking was the character of Leo, Alice's husband. Leo wasn't with Alice for many parts of the book, wasn't very convincing as a murder suspect, and even the side tangent about him having concealed his identity was irrelevant to the story even as a red herring. Of course, Alice jumped to conclusions and immediately suspected Leo of the murder for a while, but nothing about Leo connected him to any connection with the murder. 

 

All in all, The Therapist is a great suspenseful psychological thriller with an unexpected final twist. It was captivating and a very speedy read, punctuated with Alice's occasional stupidity and unnecessary conversations between neighbors.

I would recommend this book for grade 8 or 9 and up, it does contain some explicit language as well as topics such as childhood abuse and murder.

Rating: I would give this a 4/5 - Similar to The Silent Patient but being more of a domestic mystery/thriller, this was a quick read that had an unexpected plot twist. However, the main character wasn't very smart in her reasoning, and there were quite a few unnecessary scenes.