Article contributed by Rosie Smith
Many hearing-impaired inhabitants of Scunthorpe, England, find friendship, respite, understanding, and solace in the weekly deaf club. When disaster strikes and one of their own is murdered, an innocent little girl, deaf club is rocked to its core. With everyone suspecting one another, no-one feels safe and everyone seems to have a motive. Overprotective mother? Neglectful father? Distracted stepmother? Violent brother? Or was it simply a stranger and a crime of opportunity? The police don’t seem to have a clue, so police sign-language interpreter Paige and her little sister, Anna, take it upon themselves to solve the crime, stepping into a world full of dark revelations, twists, turns, and mortal danger.
Author Nell Pattison studies relationships within a small and close-knit group of people where everyone knows everyone; with gossip and rumours are rife. Love triangles, abuse, and adultery take place tinged with the realistic ‘messiness’ of real life. With all the secrets, comes a plethora of ethical and moral questions around relationships, parenting, crime, and right and wrong. Even our protagonist Paige has her own dilemmas, should she tell police that she knows more about the family involved that she’s letting on? Should she share her suspicions or has her investigation implicated her in her own crimes? Pattison invites us a question our own morals and ethics when we think, ‘what would I do?’ and is making the right decision as easy as it seems?
One of the main themes explored within The Silent House is hearing impairment and inclusion. As a hearing person, I felt that the novel gave a window into a different world and increased my understanding of the experience of those with a hearing impairment and the struggles faced in a predominantly hearing world. It prompted me to question how I myself can be more inclusive of others with different life experiences than my own. How can society as a whole become less ableist and more understanding of everyone. It added an inclusive layer to the book and will hopefully start a revolution of more diverse characters with a range of backgrounds and disabilities within crime-thrillers and murder mysteries.
The book is a little slow to start after an initial sinister short murder-scene and at times is seemed that some of the characters were a little two dimensional and could have used some further development. A past event also including the death of a child is alluded to throughout the book but when finally explained, it felt very disconnected with the rest of the story and didn’t seem to really add anything to the main storyline. If you are in it for a creepy, detailed description of the murderer tiptoeing around the house with the family sleeping soundly, unaware of their incoming doom, the book unfortunately lets us down on this front. It’s more a build up to the incident and the interviews in the aftermath, but this still makes for a sinister read in its own unique way.
Overall, The Silent House is a strong and terrifically terrifying debut novel from Pattison. The multiple red-herrings thrown in led me to question ‘who dunnit’ right up until the last few pages. I was actually panicking that there weren’t enough pages left to resolve the story! Luckily all is resolved in a satisfying and neat ending, leaving us only to wonder whether Paige resolves her own love triangle!
The Silent House is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers as of March 5th 2020.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
If someone was in your house, you’d know. Wouldn’t you? But the Hunter family are deaf, and don’t hear a thing when a shocking crime takes place in the middle of the night. Instead, they wake up to their worst nightmare.
The police call Paige Northwood to the scene to interpret for the witnesses. They’re in shock, but Paige senses the Hunters are hiding something.
One by one, people Paige knows from the Deaf community start to fall under suspicion. But who would kill a little girl? Was it an intruder? Or was the murderer closer to home?
This mystery will keep you up all night – perfect for fans of The Silent Patient and Cara Hunter
