If Alicia shot her husband, what was her motivation? If she didn’t, who did, and why was she shielding them? Why was she not talking to anyone? Who could be trusted…? I had some suspicions fairly early in the book, which turned out to be correct although I had not put the entire story or the timeline together in my mind - it’s really a very clever plot, which all comes together very nicely at the end. There’s a mysterious allusion to a classical tragedy by Euripides, ‘Alcestis’, although the reasons behind this are not clear until near the end.Īs an occasional reader of light crime fiction, I was on the lookout for clues. Alicia has not said a word to anyone since the shooting - she is the ‘Silent Patient’ of the title. He’s clearly somewhat fixated with her, and convinced that he will be able to help, even after all this time.
The silent patient alcestis trial#
The main story involves Theo starting work at the institution where Alicia was sent, after a trial which determined that she was mentally unstable. It’s a clever device, gradually introducing new information, revealing something of Alicia’s mindset at the time, and what she was afraid of. The journal dates gradually move towards the one on which Alicia’s husband Gabriel was killed. There are further brief journal entries in the book interspersed with the main narration by Theo. They seem to have a good relationship, so I was instantly hooked: why would she have shot him? Or was he, in fact, shot by someone else.? She’s an artist and he’s always been very supportive of her work. And it immediately brings a question into the narration, for Alicia clearly loves Gabriel very much. She says that she’s writing because her husband Gabriel wants her to, as she’s been quite disturbed by something. There’s a brief prologue which shows us the first entry in Alicia’s journal, written six years earlier in the weeks prior to her husband’s death. At least, it’s the first sentence of ‘part one’ of the book. This happened six years earlier than the main narration.
But it’s about a young woman called Alicia, who, we’re told in the first sentence, killed her husband when she was thirty-three. The story is told primarily in the first person by a psychotherapist called Theo.
It’s certainly tense, and there are one or two quite unpleasant moments I found it very difficult to put down, and finished it much more rapidly than I had expected to. But the narration is clear, well-paced and it’s not a difficult read at all. Billed as a psychological thriller, it didn’t sound like my kind of book at all.
I was a little apprehensive as I started to read the book a couple of days ago. It’s not a genre I would normally read, but it was chosen by the book group I belong to for the September discussion. Nor had I heard of his debut novel ‘The Silent Patient’, despite its apparent popularity. I hadn’t heard of Alex Michaelides, even though he comes from Cyprus, where I live.