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I can never guess the culprit in Agatha Christie novels until Hercule Poirot lays it all out at the end. In the same way, I didn’t see the signs or the twists coming in Alex Michaelides’ debut novel The Silent Patient (2019), even if at times they might have seemed obvious. Just not to me. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention; so absorbed was I in this cleverly crafted psychological thriller. The Silent Patient , to use a cliché, pulls you in from the start with an unsettling theme: thirty-three-year-old Alicia Berenson, a once-famous painter, shoots her husband and stops talking completely. Theo Faber, a psychotherapist, reads about her case in the papers and is determined to make her talk and find out why she did it—and, in fact, you can’t wait until he does. After all, Alicia, by her own admission, loved Gabriel and couldn’t imagine life without him. Alicia is sent to a psychiatric hospital called The Grove, where Theo manages to find a job and convinces its director, Professor Diomedes...