The Silent Patient

North American hardcover, 1st edition.

The Silent Patient is a murder 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 slain corpse. Her husband's murder has left Alicia in a sort of catatonic state where she refuses to speak or communicate in any form other than a single painting of the Greek tragedy Alcestis. After years of remaining silent while institutionalized, a psychoanalyst named Theo Faber tries to get her to speak again to find out what really happened the day her husband was murdered, but most of the people he talks to are either unwilling to talk about it, or clearly covering something up.

Personal

I was lent this book by a friend who thought I would enjoy it. I finished it on 2020-02-20 and, while I did enjoy the mystery, I had a few issues with the plot.

Status

I do not own this book, but I've listened to the audio book read by Jack Hawkins and Louise Brealey.

Review

— This section contains spoilers! —

Good

• The initial description of the murder and Alicia's situation is intriguing and a good way to begin the story.
• New information is slowly revealed which implicates new suspects and keeps you guessing for the whole book. Most of the people in the book remain suspects the whole time, and it's only near the end where you're able to discount suspects.
• I like how Theo tricks people by not revealing what he knows, and giving people enough room to concoct lies. It's a clever means of figuring out who he can trust.
• I generally find the unreliable narrator trope to be a bit overused these days, but this book did a good job of it without being too predicable or too outlandish.

Bad

• The author spends too much time on Theo's relationship with Cathy, which isn't really that important for most of the book. Also, 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.
• I didn't find enough evidence in Theo's backstory to believe he was cruel enough to torture Alicia for several hours just to punish Gabriel. I believe he would have tortured Gabriel, but not an innocent bystander. Based on his character, it seems much more likely he would be upfront with her from the beginning, especially since he personally knows how bad it feels to be betrayed. It the author added a bit more craziness to Theo, it would have been more believable.
• The choice Theo gives Gabriel is indeed right out of Alcestis, but why? It was Alicia who saw the play, not Theo. This means we have to believe that Theo just happened to recreate the plot of a exact same Greek tragedy Alicia just attended, even though he had never heard of before. This could have been solved by having Alicia see her stalker at the play.
• Rather than arrive with police in tow, the inspector meets Theo at his house and confronts him, now a known violent man, without backup. Sure, this adds to the suspense, but it's not very believable.

Ugly

• Alicia having her diary in the mental institution is totally unbelievable. She's kept it, along with an ink pen, hidden in the mental institution for six years without anyone (doctors, staff, and patients included) noticing that she was writing in it? The author states that she kept it hidden under the floorboards in her house and then sneaked it into the institution among her art supplies, but that doesn't work. Alicia would have gone from prison directly to the institution, nobody would let a convicted murderer go to their home to pack up some belongings, and, even if they did, they certainly wouldn't allow them to rummage under the floorboards unsupervised! And then how lax would the institution's security have to be to allow this sort of contraband in unnoticed? The author could have fixed this simply by having Alicia give Theo instructions on where to find her diary hidden at her old home.
• In an interview about the book, the author explains that he took graduate level psychology classes and saw a therapist for 10 years which was why he knew so much about psychology. However, when it comes time to chose quotes about psychology, he uses the now discredited ideas of Sigmund Freud? Either he didn't learn much from his classes or had terrible teachers because respectable psychologists don't rely on Freud's largely anti-scientific ideas. There was one claim that I found to be especially dangerous: in the book, a colleague of Theo's says that all people who sexually assault children were themselves sexually assaulted, which implies anyone who was not sexually assaulted as a child can't possibly assault children. Imagine if a parent actually believes this and refuses to believe their child's accusation of being sexually molested because the parent knows the accused person wasn't sexually assaulted as a child!

Media

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  The North American hardcover has a woman's face behind a translucent sheet with a tear over the mouth. I really like this cover, because the woman's face, like the titular character, isn't immediately noticeable.

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  The UK hardcover is just a psych ward with an empty chair (to represent the silent patient, gee, how clever). For a hint of flair, the designer blurs the word "silent" in the title, but, with Futura as the typeface, even this is dull.

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  The UK paperback cover is even more boring.

Links

 

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