GOODNIGHT BEAUTIFUL

SYNOPSIS

A handsome psychotherapist. His lonely wife. And in his home office ceiling, a vent …

You’d listen too, wouldn’t you? (You know you would.)

Newlyweds Sam Statler and Annie Potter are head over heels, and excited to say good-bye to New York City and start a life together in Sam's sleepy hometown upstate. Or, it turns out, a life where Annie spends most of her time alone while Sam, her therapist husband, works long hours in his downstairs office, tending to the egos of his (mostly female) clientele. Little does Sam know that through a vent in his ceiling, every word of his sessions can be heard from the room upstairs. The pharmacist's wife, contemplating a divorce. The well-known painter whose boyfriend doesn’t satisfy her in bed. Who could resist listening? Everything is fine until the French girl in the green mini Cooper shows up, and Sam decides to go to work and not come home, throwing a wrench into Sam and Annie's happily ever after.

Title: Goodnight Beautiful

Author: Aimee Molloy

Publisher: Harper

Publication date: October 13, 2020

REVIEW

RATING: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Is "Goodnight Beautiful" one of the best psychological thrillers this year? I say YES!

Well done, Ms. Molloy! You managed to leave me with my jaw on the floor not once, but twice, and that's quite an achievement in a genre so overpopulated lately.

Sam and Annie are newlyweds and recently moved to Sam's hometown, where he has established his private practice as a therapist. What he doesn't know is that his sessions can be heard from upstairs, and when a french girl in a green Mini Cooper shows up as a new patient everything goes insane. Bonkers! Bananas!

It may look as a pretty straightforward domestic suspense but by the end of part 1 I was like

Then I had to go back an re-read some chapters to confirm I had not miss anything.

Part 2 came along and by the end of it I was like

It was so clever and the writing was so good that it did not give anything away. By part 3 I was so invested in the story that I kept flying through the pages.

The characters were all really good. I specially liked Annie, confident, smart and with a dark and wry humour that I found so refreshing. And I wanna say sorry to Sam for calling him names when later was proved he didn't deserve them.

I've read some people saying the ending was a bit of a letdown and I gotta say that, although not as strong as parts 1 and 2, I have no complaints about it. If there would have been another crazy twist at the end, the whole book would have suffered from the terrible disease that is ravaging the genre these days, the "one twist too many" disease.

Fantastic psychological thriller that has all the elements you could ask of the genre, done in such an excepcional way you will not wanna stop reading.