Clara’s Verdict
Two of the three readers who have written about this audiobook say the same thing about its opening, and I would rather you heard it from me than discovered it forty minutes in. The Patient starts slowly. One reviewer calls it slow to start as it sets the scene; another says flatly that it starts off very slow and that they were a bit bored at first. Both then say the same second thing: it picks up. The first goes further, describing a pace that snowballs until the book becomes difficult to put down.
That is a useful profile to have in advance, because eleven hours and fifty-six minutes is a long stretch to invest on faith. Hannah Curtis reads for Podium Audio, published on 11 July 2023, and this is the first of the Kim Slade Thrillers, so it is the correct entry point to the series and carries the additional burden of establishing a character who will have to sustain later books. A 4.2 average across a thousand-odd ratings is a fair reflection of a novel whose first act asks for patience.
About the Audiobook
The description is written in Kim’s own voice and in the present tense, and it is an effective piece of copy. “I have a scarred man who wants my help. Why won’t he take no for an answer?” she asks, before adding that he is now sending odd gifts to her home and she no longer feels safe. The tagline underneath is the book’s whole thesis: some scars never heal.
Kim Slade has a stunning Cheltenham apartment and a charming weekend cottage in Devon, a kind and supportive partner in Chris, and work she loves helping young women with eating disorders. She also has scars, from a childhood incident she does not talk about, and Chris loves her in spite of them. Into this arrives Kyle Stannard, once a top male model and left horrifically scarred by a random attack. Kyle believes he and Kim are the same. Kim tells him she cannot help him, that it is not her field, and that refusal is where the trouble starts.
Then the objects begin arriving. A box of chocolates that is not from Chris. A beautiful mirror she did not order, which is a genuinely good detail in a novel about a scarred face. Silent phone calls in the dead of night. The police do not believe her, so she starts investigating Kyle herself, and the deeper she digs the weirder it gets. The copy then poses the question the whole book turns on: what if Kyle is not the stalker, and the person who wants to destroy her is much closer to home. One of the reviewers volunteers a detail about the childhood accident that the publisher deliberately withholds, so if you want the book’s own pacing, stay out of the review section until afterwards.
The Narration
A psychological thriller pitched this close to its protagonist is one of the hardest single-voice assignments there is, and this one falls entirely to Hannah Curtis. The performance has to keep Kim credible as a professional while letting the strain show at the edges. She is a clinician treating young women with eating disorders, so she has to sound competent and controlled, and she is simultaneously a woman being systematically frightened in her own home. Both have to be held at once without either collapsing into the other.
The slow opening places an additional weight on the reader. In a novel whose first stretch is scene-setting, the voice is the only source of forward momentum, and the difference between a listener who gives up in the first hour and one who reaches the point where it accelerates often comes down entirely to whether that voice is good company. I would sample a domestic passage rather than a suspense one, since the domestic material fills the opening hours, and it is there that this recording either holds you or does not.
What Readers Say
Three written responses, two of them five stars and one four, and they are remarkably consistent with one another. The most enthusiastic admits to being unsure at first, then describes the moment things start to unravel in Kim’s world and the pace snowballing, praising the way the tension climbs “until it reaches the peak of the precipice”. The same reader notes approvingly that everything is left neat and tidy at the end, which will please some and disappoint anyone who prefers a thriller to leave a loose thread hanging.
The line that best captures the book’s method comes from that same review: “It leaves you questioning everything, and second guessing everyone.” That is the promise a domestic thriller of this shape makes, and the reader who wrote it gave the book five stars.
The four star response is the blunt one. Slow, a bit boring at first, picks up nicely halfway through, worth a read in the end. As criticism goes that is mild, but the halfway marker deserves to be taken literally, because on this running time halfway is around six hours in. The third reviewer takes a different approach again and summarises the setup in some detail, including one biographical fact about Kim that the publisher’s copy holds back. It is a useful review and a spoiler-ish one. Curtis goes unmentioned throughout, so judge the performance from a sample rather than from the average.
Who Should Listen?
Domestic thriller readers with a tolerance for a slow build will get the most out of this. The premise is strong, the stalking escalates through objects rather than violence for a good long stretch, and the late reframing of who is actually behind it is the kind of turn the subgenre exists for. Starting at the first in a series is also a low-risk way in, since nothing is assumed and the character is being assembled in front of you.
A word of caution about the subject matter. Eating disorders in young women and facial disfigurement are both central here rather than incidental. And if you tend to abandon audiobooks that have not gripped you within the first hour, this one will test that habit harder than most, since by one reader’s account the acceleration arrives around the midpoint of a twelve hour recording.
