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505. The Perfect Wife

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:  Blake Pierce

Genre:  Fiction, Thriller, Suspense, Mystery

199 pages, published November 13, 2018

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Hoopla

Summary

In The Perfect Wife, after 29 year old criminal profiler in training and newly married Jessie Hunt moves to Orange County, the intrigue begins.  Her husband Kyle insists they join an expensive yacht club with perfect couples that Kyle insists is key to his professional advancement.  Jessie is uncomfortable from the get-go and discovers that dark secrets lurk in her new town and club.  As her world unravels, Jessie fights for her survival.

Quotes 

“got a lot of energy,” she said, trying to sound admiring. “I’d like to bottle it.” “Yeah,” Mel agreed. “He’s a piece of work. But I love him. It’s weird how stuff that annoys other people is charming when it’s your kid. You’ll see what I mean when it happens to you.

 

 “when conducting an investigation, guarding against making assumptions and setting aside preconceptions about people.”

 

My Take

Despite its 4.06 rating on Goodreads, I was disappointed in The Perfect Wife.  Full of clichés and highly implausible scenarios, I was never hooked into the underlying mystery and felt like the ending was especially contrived.  You can skip this one.

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502. Moonflower Murders

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Anthony Horowitz

Genre:    Fiction, Crime, Mystery, Thriller, Suspense

608  pages, published  November 10, 2020

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

In Moonflower Murders, best selling author and creator of Foyle’s War and Midsomer Murders Anthony Hororwitz picks up where his mystery Magpie Murders left off. As with Magpie Murders, Moonflower Murders cleverly features a book within a book.  The protagonist of the modern day mystery is Susan Ryeland, a book editor who returns to the United Kingdom after several years decompressing in Greece.  She comes home to solve a mysterious disappearance that is connected to a mystery novel she previously edited.  That novel features the famous literary detective Atticus Pund and is included in the book in its entirety.

Quotes 

“Everything in life has a pattern and a coincidence is simply the moment when the pattern becomes briefly visible.”

 

“What makes them dangerous is their belief that they should not be stopped, that they are justified in what they do. I will not speak of my experiences in the war, but I will say this. The greatest evil occurs when people, no matter what their aims or their motives, become utterly convinced that they are right.”

 

“On the one hand, they’re monstrous egotists. Self-confidence, self-examination, self-hatred even … but it’s all about self. All those hours on their own! And yet at the same time, they’re genuinely altruistic. All they want to do is please other people. I’ve often thought it must demand a sort of deficiency to be a writer.”

 

“Pünd had never seen murder as a game, not even as a puzzle to be solved. His work was an examination of humanity at its darkest and most desperate. You could not solve crime unless you understood its genesis.”

 

“There were books everywhere, hundreds of them on shelves that had been designed to fit into every nook and cranny, and it goes without saying that anyone who collects books can’t be all bad.”

 

 “I do not know what has brought you here or how you have been driven to an action as extreme as the one you are now contemplating,’ he said. ‘You must be very unhappy. Of that I am sure. Will you believe me if I say that no matter how bad things may appear, they will be better tomorrow if you allow tomorrow to do its work? That is the way of things, Miss Mitchell, and I am the living proof of it.”

 

“Atticus Pünd had no time for religion. During the war, he had been persecuted not for what he believed but for what he was, a Greek Jew whose great-grandfather had emigrated to Germany sixty years before he was born, unaware that although he was bettering his own life, his decision would lead to the extinction of almost his entire bloodline.”

 

 “We had managed to drift into that awful arena, so familiar to the long-term married couple, where what was left unspoken was actually more damaging than what was said. We weren’t married, by the way. Andreas had proposed to me, doing the whole diamond-ring-down-on-one-knee thing, but we had both been too busy to follow through, and anyway, my Greek wasn’t good enough yet to understand the service.”

 

 “It wasn’t that she would judge me. It was more that I would feel myself being judged.”

 

My Take

I read Magpie Murders during the second year of my reading quest and loved it.  I followed that with several more books by the incredibly talented writer Anthony Horowitz, but have not liked any of them nearly as much as Moonflower Murders, the sequel to Magpie Murders.  Horowitz knows how to spin a complex, incredibly clever trail that keeps you turning the pages long after bedtime.  I highly recommend (but read Magpie Murders first).

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497. Troubled Blood

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Joni Renee Zalk

Author:   Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling)

Genre:   Fiction, Crime, Suspense, Thriller, Mystery

944 pages, published  September 15, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

Troubled Blood is the fifth book in J.K. Rowling’s Cormoran Strike detective series.  Strike and his partner Robin Ellacott are hired by a woman whose mother, Margot Bamborough, disappeared forty years ago in 1974 without a trace.  As they investigate this cold case, Strike and Robin encounter tarot cards, a psychopathic serial killer and witnesses who cannot be trusted, along with their own long simmering feelings for each other.

Quotes 

“We aren’t our mistakes. It’s what we do about the mistake that shows who we are.”

 

“Every married person he knew seemed desperate to chivvy others into matrimony, no matter how poor an advertisement they themselves were for the institution.”

 

“Then he closed his eyes, and like millions of his fellow humans, wondered why troubles could never come singly, but in avalanches, so that you became increasingly destabilized with every blow that hit you.”

 

 “. . . she’d seen a flicker of something in his face that wasn’t mere friendship, and they’d hugged, and she’d felt . . . Best not to dwell on that hug, on how like home it had felt, on how a kind of insanity had gripped her at that moment, and she’d imagined him saying ‘come with me’ and known she’d have gone if he had.”

 

“But he was her best friend. This admission, held at bay for so long, caused an almost painful twist in Robin’s heart, not least because she knew it would be impossible ever to tell Strike so.”

 

“But people who fundamentally change are rare, in my experience, because it’s bloody hard work compared to going on a march or waving a flag. Have we met a single person on this case who’s radically different to the person they were forty years ago?”  “I don’t know . . . I think I’ve changed,” said Robin, then felt embarrassed to have said it out loud.  Strike looked at her without smiling for the space it took him to chew and swallow a chip, then said, “Yeah. But you’re exceptional, aren’t you?”

 

 “How could he say, look, I’ve tried not to fancy you since you first took your coat off in this office. I try not to give names to what I feel for you, because I already know it’s too much, and I want peace from the shit that love brings in its wake. I want to be alone, and unburdened, and free.  But I don’t want you to be with anyone else. I don’t want some other bastard to persuade you into a second marriage. I like knowing the possibility’s there, for us to, maybe . . .  Except, it’ll go wrong, of course, because it always goes wrong, because if I were the type for permanence, I’d already be married. And when it goes wrong, I’ll lose you for good, and this thing we’ve built together, which is literally the only good part of my life, my vocation, my pride, my greatest achievement, will be forever fucked, because I won’t find anyone I enjoy running things with, the way I enjoy running them with you, and everything afterward will be tainted by the memory of you.

 

 “If I’ve taken you for granted,” said Strike, “I’m sorry. You’re the best I’ve got.”

 

“I think there are a lot of nutters in the world, and the less we reward them for their nuttery, the better for all of us.”

 

“He was well aware that he hadn’t told Polworth the whole truth about his relationship with Robin Ellacott, which, after all, was nobody else’s business. The truth was that his feelings contained nuances and complications that he preferred not to examine. For instance, he had a tendency, when alone, bored, or low-spirited, to want to hear her voice.”

 

“And there was something more, something highly unusual. Strike had never once made her feel physically uncomfortable. Two of them in the office, for a long time the only workers at the agency, and while Robin was a tall woman, he was far bigger, and he’d never made her feel it, as so many men did . . .”

 

“The roses, which were for Joan, were also for him: they said, you won’t be alone, you have something you’ve built, and all right, it might not be a family, but there are still people who care about you waiting in London. Strike told himself ‘people,’ because there were five names on the card, but he turned away thinking only of Robin.”

 

“. . . Strike explained about his failed attempt to buy Robin perfume, the previous December.

‘ . . . so I asked the assistant, but he kept showing me things with names like . . . I dunno . . . “Shaggable You” . . . ‘  The laugh Robin failed to repress was so loud that people turned to look at her . . .  and I panicked,’ Strike admitted . . .”

 

“Robin was thinking, is this where single people end up, people without children to look out for them, without double incomes? In small boxes, living vicariously through reality stars?”

 

“She’s lived with it for forty years . . . People who live with something that massive stop being able to see it. It’s the backdrop of their lives. It’s only glaringly obvious to everyone else.”

 

My Take

Having read the four previous Cormoran Strike novels ( The Cuckoo’s Calling, The Silkworm, Career of Evil and Lethal White) I was really looking forward to Troubled Blood.  I was not disappointed.  While J.K. Rowling is adept at spinning an engrossing mystery, this series really shines when it focuses on the protagonists Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacot.  The two are fascinating characters and the “will they, won’t they” dynamic really works.  At 944 pages, Troubled Blood is a commitment to read, but it is well worth the time.

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469. Bag of Bones

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Stephen King

Genre:   Fiction, Thriller, Mystery, Fantasy, Suspense, Horror

529 pages, published September 22, 1998

Reading Format:  Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

Bag of Bones is the story of novelist Mike Noonan and the grief he suffers after the sudden death of his pregnant wife Jo.  Mike develops writer’s block which is temporarily relieved when he returns to Sara Laughs, their remote vacation home on a lake in Maine.  There he meets the beautiful young widow Maddie and her toddler daughter Kyra.  Much stands in the way of Mike and Maddie’s growing attraction for each other:  her vengeful ex father in law who wants custody of Kyra, Mike’s reluctance to be with someone so much younger and the ghosts that increasingly insert themselves into the lives of Mike and those around him.

Quotes 

“Compared to the dullest human being actually walking about on the face of the earth and casting his shadow there,” Hardy supposedly said, “the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones.” I understood because that was what I felt like in those interminable, dissembling days: a bag of bones.”

“Humor is almost always anger with its make-up on.”

 

“This is how we go on: one day at a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time. Dentists go on one root-canal at a time; boat-builders go on one hull at a time. If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind us as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things – fish and unicorns and men on horseback – but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightening flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.”

 

“For men, I think, love is a thing formed of equal parts lust and astonishment. The astonishment part women understand. The lust part they only think they understand.”

 

“I felt lonely and content at the same time. I believe that is a rare kind of happiness.”

 

“Grief is like a drunken house guest, always coming back for one more goodbye hug.”

 

“I was being paid to do what I loved, and there’s no gig on earth better than that; it’s like a license to steal.”

 

“I see things, that’s all. Write enough stories and every shadow on the floor looks like a footprint; every line in the dirt like a secret message.”

 

“A person can go along quite awhile if they get a good day every once and again.”

 

“I think reality is thin, you know, thin as lake ice after a thaw, and we fill our lives with noise and light and motion to hide that thinness from ourselves.”

 

“Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled on to the bestseller lists by the magic words AUTHOR OF on the covers of their books.”

 

“Fear is actually an acronym for Fuck Everything And Run.”

 

“And perhaps the greatest blessing was that we never knew how short the time was.”

 

“Murder is the worst kind of pornography, murder is let me do what I want taken to its final extreme.”

 

My Take

I have always enjoyed reading Stephen King and Bag of Bones was no exception.  In fact, it is now one of my favorite Stephen King books. Improving the reading experience was Stephen King narrating the audio version himself.  The main character novelist Mike Noonan is a stand in for King and hearing King tell this story adds extra resonance.  I especially enjoyed the touching relationship between Mike and toddler Kyra that is tenderly drawn.  I highly recommend this book.

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464. Pretty Things

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Lisa Stock

Author:  Janelle Brown

Genre:   Fiction, Romance, Mystery, Thriller, Suspense

496 pages, published April 21, 2020

Reading Format:  e-Book on Overdrive

Summary

Pretty Things tells the story of two very different women.  Nina is a grifter who grew up bouncing from town to town with her less than honorable single mother.  Vanessa is an heiress who has made a name for herself as a lifestyle Instagram celebrity.  Their worlds collide in Lake Tahoe where the two engage in a cat and mouse, table turning game of deceit and duplicity.

Quotes 

“Nothing is ever as pure as it seems at first glance; there is always something more complicated to be found when you peel back the unmarred surface of pretty things.”

 

“Perspective is, by nature, subjective. It’s impossible to climb inside someone else’s head, despite your best-or worst-intentions.”

 

“It’s easiest to judge from distance. That’s why the Internet has turned us all into armchair critics, experts at the cold dissection of gesture and syllable, sneering self-righteously from the safety of our screens. There, we can feel good about ourselves, validated that our flaws weren’t as bad as theirs, unchallenged in our superiority. Moral high ground is a pleasant place to preach, even if the view turns out to be rather limited in scope.”

 

“But I suppose that’s the point of it all, for Vanessa: To throw herself into the world she wants to inhibit in the hopes of forgetting the one in which she really lives. Who am I to say she’s wrong to try? We all build our own delusions and then live inside them, constructing walls to conveniently hide the things we don’t want to see. Maybe it means that we’re crazy, or maybe it means that we’re monsters, or maybe it’s just the world we live in now makes it so hard to separate truth from image from dream.”

 

“Anything you do in fury’s service feels justifiable; no matter how petty, how small, how nasty or cruel.”

 

“Caption-and-comment culture in all its brevity leaves out the middle ground, where most of life is found.”

 

“Social media feeds the narcissistic monster that lives within us all, I would think to myself. It feeds it and grows it until the beast takes over and you are left outside the frame, just looking at images of this creature, like everyone else in your feed, wondering what it is that you birthed and why it’s living the life you wish you had.”

 

“Maybe our greatest strength as human beings is also our greatest weakness, the need to love and be loved.”

 

“and that, in fact, for most people not born into privilege, the playing field is a steep incline and you are at the bottom with boulders tied to your ankles.”

 

“They say DNA is destiny. And probably this is true for those with gift coded in their genes: say, a rare beauty or intelligence, the ability to run a four minute mile or dunk a basketball, or perhaps just innate cunning or insatiable drive. But for the rest of the world, those born without some obvious greatness, it’s not your DNA that will get you ahead; it’s the life you were born into. The opportunities you were (or weren’t) handed on a silver platter. It’s your circumstances.”

 

“Smarts mean a lot in the world, but good looks even more.”

 

“I watch and I wait. I study what people have, and where they have it. It’s easy because they show me. Their social media accounts are like windows into their worlds that they’ve flung open, begging me to peer inside and take inventory.”

 

“In the end, we are all our mothers’ children, no matter how saintly or evil they might be; and the loss of their love is the earthquake that cracks your foundation forever. It’s permanent damage.”

 

“This is the great horror of life: that mistakes are forever, and cannot be undone. You can never truly go back, even if you want to retrace your steps and take another route. The path has already disappeared behind you.”

 

“There is no one path in life that is set before you, I’m starting to realize; no one is making your decisions for you.”

 

“When you’re documenting everything you do, you stop living life for yourself and start living it as a performance for others. You’re never in the actual moment, just the response to the moment.”

 

“Sex—it can be about love, yes. And it’s wonderful when it’s that, and God, baby, I hope that’s what you’ve found. But it’s also a tool. Men use it to prove a point to themselves, about their power to take what they want. You’re just the first rung on the ladder of their world domination. And when that’s the kind of sex you’re having—which is most of the time—you got to make sure that you’re using it as a tool, too. Don’t let yourself be used up by them, all the time believing it’s some kind of equal relationship. Make sure you’re getting just as much out of it as they are.”

 

“Was it any wonder that people on the wrong side of the glass would eventually decide to take a hammer and break it, reach through and take some of it for themselves?”

 

My Take

Pretty Things was a roller coaster thrill ride that I whipped through.  In the same vein as Gone Girl, Janelle Brown knows how to write a cliff hanging page turner.  I love getting caught up in a non-stop, well written thriller and thoroughly enjoyed the time I spent reading Pretty Things.

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450. The Institute

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Stephen King

Genre:   Fiction, Horror, Thriller, Fantasy

561 pages, published September 10, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

In the middle of the night, twelve year old Luke Ellis is kidnapped from his house in suburban Minneapolis and his parents are murdered.  Luke wakes up in a bizarre facility known as The Institute which imprisons kids like him with special powers including telepathy and telekinesis.  Luke’s mission is to escape from The Institute.

Quotes 

“Great events turn on small hinges.”

 

“He wanted to tell Luke that he loved him. But there were no words, and maybe no need of them. Or telepathy. Sometimes a hug was telepathy.”

 

“It came to him, with the force of a revelation, that you had to have been imprisoned to fully understand what freedom was.”

 

“It was so simple, but it was a revelation: what you did for yourself was what gave you the power.”

 

“There was an abyss. And books contained magical incantations to raise what was hidden there, all the great mysteries.”

 

“It came to him (and with the force of a revelation) that life was basically one long SAT test, and instead of four or five choices, you got dozens.”

 

“Seventy years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated by atomic bombs, the world is still here even though many nations have atomic weapons, even though primitive human emotions still hold sway over rational thought and superstition masquerading as religion still guides the course of human politics.”

 

My Take

Another quick-moving, compelling read by Stephen King.  Not his best work, but very enjoyable nonetheless.  Perfect escapism for a vacation.

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449. In Six Days: An Eco-Terrorism Fable

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Mike Mendelsohn

Author:   Mike Mendelsohn

Genre:   Fiction, Thriller

289 pages, published 2020

Reading Format:  e-Book

Summary

In Six Days:  An Eco-Terrorism Fable is a thriller that follows a two eco-terrorists who are destroying ecological harmful sites throughout the U.S. in an escalating fashion.  It also follows a washed up, widower with a free spirited daughter who has made a small fortune trading bitcoin and a cabal of Republican congressmen who have blood on their hands.

Quotes 

I read this book as part of a book group of which the author, a first time fiction writer, is a member.  I commend him actually writing a book, something that is very hard to do.  As a conservative, I am not the target audience for this book.  I found the portrayal of the “evil” Republican congressmen to be one-dimensional and clichéd.   I imagine that those with a more left-wing persuasion might enjoy this book more than I did.

 

My Take

I read this book as part of a book group of which the author, a first time fiction writer, is a member.  I commend him actually writing a book, something that is very hard to do.  As a conservative, I am not the target audience for this book.  I found the portrayal of the “evil” Republican congressmen to be one-dimensional and clichéd.   I imagine that those with a more left-wing persuasion might enjoy this book more than I did.

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438. Pieces of Her

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:    Karin Slaughter

Genre:   Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Crime

496 pages, published May 21, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Hoopla

Summary

Pieces of Her is a twisty thriller that follows two tracks.  In the present day track, Andrea Cooper is on the run after watching her mother Laura professionally kill a would be killer.  As she makes her escape, Andrea learns that her mother is not who she thought she was.  The second track takes places more than twenty years earlier and provides the back story for Laura.

Quotes 

“Love doesn’t keep you in a constant state of turmoil. It gives you peace.”

 

“They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds. —Mexican Proverb”

 

“She had dozens, even hundreds, of friends, but not one single person knew all of the pieces of her.”

 

“Men can always reinvent themselves,” Laura said. “For women, once you’re a mother, you’re always a mother.”

 

“Age is a cruel punishment for youth.”

 

“Men never have to be uncomfortable around women. Women have to be uncomfortable around men all of the time.”

 

My Take

I found Pieces of Her to be a serviceable thriller with a few interesting plot points.  However, it would have been improved by condensing to a shorter version.

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426. Long Bright River

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Ashley Christianson

Author:   Liz Moore

Genre:   Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Crime

482 pages, published January 7, 2020

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Long Bright River takes place in Kensington, a rundown Philadelphia neighborhood that has been decimated by the opioid crisis.  Mickey is a single mother and a beat police officer trying to escape her painful childhood by making a better life with her young son.  Her estranged sister Kacey, from whom whe was once inseparable, is a junkie and a prostitute.  When Kacey disappears and young women begin showing up as murder victims, Mickey risks everything to find her sister before it is too late.

Quotes 

“This was the secret I learned that day: none of them want to be saved. They all want to sink backward toward the earth again, to be swallowed by the ground, to keep sleeping. There is hatred on their faces when they are roused from the dead.”

 

“Who on earth can explain, in words alone, the great gutting tenderness of holding your child in your arms? The animal feeling of it—the baby’s soft muzzle, the baby’s new skin (which throws into relief the wear your own has endured), the little hand reaching up to your face, searching for family. The quick small pats, light as moths, that land on your cheek and chest.”

 

“I wouldn’t listen. I wanted everything to stay as it was. I was more afraid of the truth than the lie. The truth would change the circumstances of my life. The lie was static. The lie was peaceful. I was happy with the lie.”

 

“Some people do have trouble with Kensington, but to me the neighborhood itself has become like a relative, slightly problematic but dear in the old-fashioned way that that word is sometimes used, treasured, valuable to me.”

 

“I tried hard to ignore the low noise that thrummed throughout my day, some tolling, cautionary bell. I wouldn’t listen. I wanted everything to stay as it was. I was more afraid of the truth than the lie. The truth would change the circumstances of my life. The lie was static. The lie was peaceful. I was happy with the lie.”

 

My Take

I really loved Long Bright River, a gripping, beautifully written thriller that is so much more than a thriller.  Author Liz Moore takes you deep inside the life of Mickey Fitzpatrick, a flawed but deeply human police officer, who struggles to do the right thing as she is repeatedly forced to deal with difficult situations.  The back stories of Mickey and her sister Kacey are heart breaking but ring very true.  I couldn’t put this book down.  Highly recommended.

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425. The Silent Patient

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:    Alex Michaelides

Genre:   Fiction, Thriller, Mystery

325 pages, published February 5, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

The Silent Patient is a psychological thriller written from the point of view of Theo Faber, a criminal psychotherapist whose latest patient is Alicia Berenson, a famous painter who is in a mental ward after killing her husband Gabriel, a successful fashion photographer.  Since the murder, Alicia has refused to speak.  Her most recent painting, entitled Alcestis, is a self portrait and is based on the Greek myth of a female heroine who is betrayed by her husband who selfishly asks his wife, Alcestis, to die in his place. When Alcestis is returned to him from her death, Alcestis mysteriously remains mute.

Quotes 

“Choosing a lover is a lot like choosing a therapist. We need to ask ourselves, is this someone who will be honest with me, listen to criticism, admit making mistakes, and not promise the impossible?”

 

“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive, and will come forth later, in uglier ways. —SIGMUND FREUD”

 

“The aim of therapy is not to correct the past, but to enable the patient to confront his own history, and to grieve over it. —ALICE MILLER”

 

“We’re all crazy, I believe, just in different ways.”

 

“About fireworks?

About love. About how we often mistake love for fireworks – for drama and dysfunction. But real love is very quiet, very still. It’s boring, if seen from the perspective of high drama. Love is deep and calm – and constant. I imagine you do give Kathy love – in the true sense of the word. Whether or not she is capable of giving it back to you is another question.”

 

“At the time I didn’t understand. But that’s how therapy works. A patient delegates his unacceptable feelings to his therapist; and she holds everything he is afraid to feel, and feels it for him. Then, ever so slowly, she feeds his feelings back to him.”

 

“There’s so much pain everywhere, and we just close our eyes to it. The truth is we’re all scared. We’re terrified of each other.”

 

“Somehow grasping at vanishing snowflakes is like grasping at happiness: an act of possession that instantly gives way to nothing. It reminded me that there was a world outside this house: a world of vastness and unimaginable beauty; a world that for now, remained out of my reach. That memory had repeatedly returned to me over the years. It’s as if the misery that surrounded that brief moment of freedom made it burn even brighter: a tiny light surrounded by darkness.”

 

“Love that doesn’t include honesty doesn’t deserve to be called love.”

 

“You know, one of the hardest things to admit is that we weren’t loved when we needed it most. It’s a terrible feeling, the pain of not being loved.”

 

“I believe the same is true for most people who go into mental health. We are drawn to this profession because we are damaged – we study psychology to heal ourselves. Whether we are prepared to admit this or not is another question.”

 

“No one is born evil. As Winnicott put it, “A baby cannot hate the mother, without the mother first hating the baby.”

 

My Take

The Silent Patient is a taut thriller that delves into the worlds of greek mythology and modern day therapy.  It kept me guessing and there were some unexpected twists at the end.  Recommended.

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