in the face, and her twisted relationship with psychotherapist Theo.
Everyone from Lee Child to David Baldacci to last years big thriller breakout A.J.
Finn (The Woman in the Window) has offered pre-publication raves.
Credit: Wolf Marloh; Celadon Books
The novel publishes Feb. 5 and isavailable for pre-order.
Excerpt fromThe Silent Patientby Alex Michaelides
Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband.
They had been married for seven years.
They were both artists.
Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer.
He had a distinctive style, shooting semi-starved, semi-naked women in strange, unflattering angles.
Since his death, the price of his photographs has increased astronomically.
I find his stuff rather slick and shallow, to be honest.
It has none of the visceral quality of Alicias best work.
Her talent will always be overshadowed by her notoriety, so its hard to be objective.
And you might well accuse me of being biased.
All I can offer is my opinion, for what its worth.
And to me, Alicia was a kind of genius.
Gabriel Berenson was murdered six years ago.
He was forty-four years old.
The day he died was the hottest of the year.
On the last day of his life, Gabriel rose early.
He spent the day photographing models on a rooftop forVogue.
Not much is known about Alicias movements.
She had an upcoming exhibition and was behind with her work.
Barbie phoned the police, and a car was dispatched from the station on Haverstock Hill at 11:35 p.m.
It arrived at the Berensons house in just under three minutes.
The front door was open.
The house was in pitch-black darkness; none of the light switches worked.
The officers made their way along the hallway and into the living room.
They shone torches around the room, illuminating it in intermittent beams of light.
Alicia was discovered standing by the fireplace.
Her white dress glowed ghostlike in the torchlight.
Alicia seemed oblivious to the presence of the police.
A gun was on the floor.
At first the officers thought he was alive.
His head lolled slightly to one side, as if he were unconscious.
Then a beam of light revealed Gabriel had been shot several times in the face.
His handsome features were gone forever, leaving a charred, blackened, bloody mess.
The wall behind him was sprayed with fragments of skull, brains, hair and blood.
The officers assumed it was Gabriels blood.
But there was too much of it.
And then something glinted in the torchlighta knife was on the floor by Alicias feet.
Another beam of light revealed the blood spattered on Alicias white dress.
An officer grabbed her arms and held them up to the light.
There were deep cuts across the veins in her wristsfresh cuts, bleeding hard.
Alicia fought off the attempts to save her life; it took three officers to restrain her.
She was taken to the Royal Free Hospital, only a few minutes away.
She collapsed and lost consciousness on the way there.
She had lost a lot of blood, but she survived.
The following day, she lay in bed in a private room at the hospital.
The police questioned her in the presence of her lawyer.
Alicia remained silent throughout the interview.
Her lips were pale, bloodless; they fluttered occasionally but formed no words, made no sounds.
She answered no questions.
She could not, would not, speak.
Nor did she speak when charged with Gabriels murder.
She remained silent when she was placed under arrest, refusing to deny her guilt or confess it.
Alicia never spoke again.
Alicia remained silentbut she made one statement.
It was begun when she was discharged from the hospital and placed under house arrest before the trial.
According to the court-appointed psychiatric nurse, Alicia barely ate or sleptall she did was paint.
The monstrous lack of remorse of a cold-blooded killer.
But let us not forget that while Alicia Berenson may be a murderer, she was also an artist.
The painting was a self-portrait.
She titled it in the bottom lefthand corner of the canvas, in light blue Greek lettering.
One word:
Alcestis.
FromThe Silent Patientby Alex Michaelides.
