The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides 

Genre: mystery

Setting: modern London

I read it as a(n): hardback

Source: my own collection / BOTM Club

Length: 325 pp

Published by: Celadon (5 Feb 2019)

Her Grace’s rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Alicia Berenson and her husband Gabriel are, by all accounts, deeply in love with each other. Both have successful careers, her as a painter and him as a fashion photographer. All seems peachy keen until the day when Alicia shoots Gabriel in the face five times and then never speaks again.

OK, so I can completely get it. Alicia had a mood and acted on it. But as with their marriage, things were not all as they appeared. Alicia is moved to a mental health facility, having been found criminally insane or mentally incompetent, whichever is the right term in the British justice system. She refuses to speak. She has violent outbursts. She gets a new shrink, Theo Faber, who is a criminal psychotherapist convinced he can get her to talk. His own motives need some analyzing as well, though.

I don’t get the hype of this book. Yes, it was a really fast read so it didn’t completely suck. But the suspension of disbelief required of readers is too much, at least for me. For one thing, and this is big for me, I’m thoroughly sick of authors – male authors especially – using women as both a stereotype and a plot point. Alicia was depicted as broken, abused, fragile, and so, naturally, crazy. The various ways she was abused served as plot points. It gets really old. 

Also, she refused to speak and was caught literally with the smoking gun just moments after she shot her husband, but we’re supposed to believe she managed to hide her secret diary and keep it hidden all these years, through various transfers to prison and psych wards? Yeah, right. 

And the Big Reveal? The reason she didn’t speak for years? She simply had nothing to say??!! Just no. That is something that would work if one has had a boring day, not when one shoots a spouse in the face and goes to the boobyhatch for years as a result. Come on. I was done at that point.

I do have to say that I liked the way the two story lines crossed and merged, and how it wasn’t clear until the end that one was actually in flashback. I did think that was kind of neat. Just the execution of the story itself was not.