The Silent Patient

The Silent Patient is a mystery book written by Alex Michaelides and published on 2019-02-05. In the book, Alicia Berenson is a successful painter with a loving husband, but she is convicted of his murder when she is found standing next to his brutally murdered corpse. The murder it seems has left Alicia catatonic as she refuses to speak or communicate in any form other than a single painting. After years of remaining silent while institutionalized, a psycho-analyst named Theo Faber tries to get her to speak again to find out what really happened between her and her husband.

I was lent this book by a friend who thought I would enjoy it.

Status

I do not own this book, but I am reading it.

Review

Good

• The initial description of the murder and Alicia's situation is intriguing.
• New information is slowly revealed which implicates new suspects and keeps you guessing for the whole book. Even Alicia remains a suspect the whole time.

Bad

• The author spends a bit too much time initially on Theo's backstory and relationship with Cathy, which isn't really that important. And Theo's passive aggressive attitude with his cheating wife is very unappealing to me. Luckily, his tenacity as a detective prevents him from becoming too unlikable.
• The quotes from Sigmund Freud and the multiple references to now discredited psycho analysis caused me to lose faith in the author's psychological research for the novel. Respectable psychologists no longer appeal to largely anti-scientific ideas like the blank slate. Some of the claims, like that only people who were sexually assaulted as a child become adults who sexually assault children, aren't just completely untrue, they're dangerous. Imagine if a reader believes this and they own child accuses someone of sexually molesting them, but, because the parent knows the accused wasn't sexually assaulted as a child, they ignore their own child's accusation!

Ugly

• Nothing.

Media

The North American release has a woman's face behind a translucent sheet with a tear over the mouth. I really like this cover, it isn't immediately noticeable, and it fits the book very well.

Links

 

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Michaelides - Wikipedia, author.