Book Review #109: The Therapist by B A Paris

I have a couple of books by B A Paris, but this is the first one that I got around to reading. I bought it because I really liked the concept, and I was definitely in the mood for a good thriller!

When Alice and Leo move into The Circle, a gated exclusive community, it seems to be everything they dreamed of. But when Alice discovers the history of the house, and what happened to the woman who used to live there, she becomes obsessed with solving the mystery. Is The Circle, and its residents, really as perfect as they seem?

I really liked this book! I didn't love it at the beginning, but by the end, I was hooked.

At the start, everyone in the story, including Alice herself, felt very disingenuous, and I couldn't work out if that was how it was supposed to feel.

The book goes from odd to captivating in the space of a few lines. I went from not really caring about it to not being able to put it down.

There was a lot of unnecessary description. We don't need to know that someone used both hands to smooth their hair down, or that someone else tucked his shirt into his waistband because he'd left it loose while having breakfast. It was all a bit much and tended to halt the narrative. Some of this also happened through info-dumping, framed as a character being 'inquisitive'.

There was also a lot of repetition, mostly in the form of Alice asking different people the same questions over and over again, in exactly the same format.

I liked Alice as a character, but she could be quite frustrating, which makes certain parts of the book irritating the read - we're rolling our eyes at Alice rather than trying to find out what's going on.

There are a lot of pieces of information that are revealed too conveniently - Alice just happens to overhear multiple conversations about her, adding integral information to her investigation? This was the main reason I couldn't give the book a higher rating.

Having said that, I was completely lost in this story. I couldn't put it down, and when I did, I couldn't stop thinking about it. I made every guess under the sun and didn't get things completely right, which added to how much I enjoyed it.

The story is told in an interesting way. It's the kind of story that makes you flip back and forth throughout the book to see if you should have picked up on anything that was revealed.

Overall, I'd definitely recommend this book. It was thrilling, exciting, and definitely a story that you don't want to put down until you've solved the mystery.

4/5