Reclusive ex-movie star throws a party in a secluded location and someone is murdered. This sounds like a fairly routine cookie-cutter narrative found in dozens of books lining local bookstore shelves. Until you put it in the hands of Alex Michaelides. There is a reason that "The Silent Patient" is still being talked about by those who have read it years after its release; the man knows what he's doing and how to pull in his reader. And this novel is no exception. Rather than giving us the rote murder mystery narrative one might expect from the description, he once again takes a seemingly basic concept and makes it much deeper and richer than is strictly necessary. Here he creates the beginnings of a brilliant character study; as the narrator puts it, not a whodunit but a "whydunit". And that is what makes this book stand out. The author is not focused so much on getting from Point A to Point B to Point C to move the story along, and is instead invested in giving his characters a rich inner life to fully flesh them out and therefore make the events that occur that much more impactful. While this is one of the shortest excerpts I've read on this site, I can fully understand the decision to give a truncated first look. With the amount of care and thought that went into this work, anything longer would both make it hard to find an appropriate stopping point, and risk spoiling a story that is clearly best read in one sitting.