Book Review: "The Therapist" by B.A Paris

I have read B.A Paris before. The novel “The Dilemma” is probably one of the better domestic thrillers I have encountered in a long time. Domestic thriller is a term that not many people are able to work out, does it mean in the home? Does it mean as a part of a family? Does it mean something entirely different altogether? Well, a domestic thriller is a combination of the two - it is a crime/thriller novel that takes place predominately in the home and with a set of main characters who are all family. In this next read by B.A Paris, I was expecting to see similar themes of secrecies and more developed characters (I really can’t tell you how much I enjoyed “The Dilemma” so, just read the review here), plus I was hoping for something that mimicked the style of “The Dilemma”. What I ended up getting was something slightly different and though I like slow-burning books, I have to say in some respects the pace was a bit all over the place and there were far too many characters. Apart from this, the book was an enjoyable read and I did, in fact, still read it in one sitting. Let us take a look at what it is about:

Leo and Alice have moved into a gated community in London’s Finbury Park - it’s called The Circle. Alice wants to get to know people in the community and so, asks to be added to a WhatsApp messaging group in order to invite everyone to a party complete with champagne and finger foods. Lots of people show up, apart from the elderly couple, of whom it was known didn’t like parties all that much. Tim says his wife Maria couldn’t make it since she was babysitting the children and couldn’t find someone else to do it. Alice makes a point a day or so after the party to go and say hello to Maria as a result of this, but the man who came to the party and Maria’s husband are two completely different people. Alice is struck confused. Leo awakens in the middle of the night thinking that he can see someone in their house. There is a strange air that means someone knows something and, at the party, there was a woman watching Alice with a narrow scowl on her face. Things are about to fall apart very quickly as Alice needs to find out who is hunting her and Leo and what it has to do with them in particular. Told in mostly chronological order apart from flashbacks and strange chapters entitled “The Past” - this book is a brilliant rainy-day thriller to get your mind turning. Whatever you think the twist is, by the way, that really is not it.

Again, it isn’t exactly a perfect book. It has a few too many characters for my taste and given the book’s length means you don’t really get to see too many characters in detail. You also have to remember where the different characters live in comparison to Alice and Leo in this gated community because it makes the book easier to read, but this again is a short-lived task as the book isn’t that long. The writing is brilliant, it is classic B.A Paris - filled with secrets, lies and people purposefully withholding information from other people. However, I think that another revision of this book before publication could have cut out a few characters that were stuck in the background or at least made the book a tiny bit longer so I could get to know them better. Trust me, when it comes to B.A Paris, I don’t mind if the book is longer.