Alice is excited to be moving to London with her partner Leo. They have found a house in a gated community where they can be together and build a future. They can make friends with the other residents of The Circle, maybe one day get married, and start a family. And they got such a good deal on the house that Alice didn’t even have to give up the cottage where she’s been living. It seems perfect.
Shortly after they moved in and joined the neighborhood app, Alice invites everyone in The Circle over for drinks on a Saturday night. She thought that would be a good way to get to know the others in the neighborhood, but when Leo finds out that she did that, he is not happy. He does go along with it though, and hangs out in the backyard with their neighbors, talking and drinking.
Alice tries to get in with some of the women in The Circle, wanting to make new friends and find a place where she could belong. However, she feels a little frozen out by some of the other wives. But she’s determined to keep trying. It’s not until a couple of weeks later, when she finds out the truth about their house, that she understands why the other women might be a little reluctant to be friends.
A private investigator comes by the house to talk to Alice, and she realizes that he was at the drinks party, pretending to be someone from The Circle. She had even shown him around the house, like she had with a couple of the neighbors. While most of the houses there have the same layout, Leo had combined two of the rooms upstairs to make one larger bedroom, and Alice had thought that they were curious to see how it turned out. But the PI, Thomas, tells her that there had been a woman killed in one of those upstairs bedrooms. She had been a therapist, and her name was Nina Maxwell.
Alice is taken aback. She had no idea of the murder and is immediately upset with their real estate agent for not informing them about it. She no longer feels comfortable in her own home. And then she realizes that not knowing about Nina’s death, and showing her new neighbors around the upstairs bedroom, must have come across as insensitive. She is mortified of what the neighbors must think, and goes around to make apologies.
There is still the problem of not being informed of the murder before they bought the house and moved on. And there is the coincidence of the name Nina, which was her sister’s name, her sister who died young in the same car accident that had killed their parents. But it does answer one thing for Alice. There were times at night that Alice thought there was someone else in the house. Now that she knows what happened to Nina, Alice thinks it’s her ghost, and starts talking to her.
Nina’s husband had been charged with her murder, and then he committed suicide. But based on what the PI had told Alice, she is starting to wonder if justice had been done after all. As she digs into the information of the murder, Alice realizes that The Circle has a lot of secrets, and it’s possible that someone killed to keep those secrets hidden. But if Alice tries to bring those secrets to light, will the killer decide that she should be silenced before Alice finds out the truth?
Bestselling thriller writer B.A. Paris is back with The Therapist, a domestic thriller that looks at what can happen in a gated community when you’re locked in with lies and secrets. Locked in Alice’s imagination, we are taken on a journey of questioning and curiosity into accusations and paranoia.
I got to listen to the audiobook for this, and I adored narrator Olivia Dowd. From the beginning of the book, she made the tension palpable. I could feel it in my shoulders almost right away. She has a beautiful voice for this novel, and I thought that listening to her read this novel made a fun reading experience into a truly wonderful journey. I definitely recommend this as an audiobook, if you can take it.
A copy of the audiobook for The Therapist was provided by Macmillan Audio through NetGalley, with many thanks.
