If someone broke into your house while you were sleeping, you would know, wouldn’t you? The Hunter family are certain they would. Except when someone does break into their house and murders their daughter, they don’t hear a thing. Everyone in the house that night was deaf, no-one heard a thing. But Sign Language Interpreter Paige Northwood believes that the family knows more than they are letting on.
Paige isn’t an investigator, she is someone who fell into BSL interpreting because her sister is deaf, so Paige can straddle both the deaf and hearing communities. She usually helps at parents’ evenings, doctor’s appointments, and other such innocuous engagements. This case is her first experience working with the police, and she is faced with the dead body of a toddler, and a traumatised family who she knows through the local deaf community. She’s immediately over her head, but as the only person able to communicate with the police and the family, she’s committed to staying with the case.
She’s placed in an unusual position, as someone who the police are relying on, but also as someone with a personal connection to the family. The murdered child’s mother is her sister’s best friend, the child was her sister’s goddaughter. All it takes is for Paige to start asking innocuous questions of the people around her, and suddenly her life is being threatened too, and she can’t work out why. Paige has to balance her professionalism with the police, with working out why her life is suddenly in danger, and it causes conflict both with the detectives, and with her family.
I thought it was interesting to provide a narrative character with no professional experience in investigation, or any interest in it. I loved that it demonstrated how easy it is to feel isolated when you cannot communicate with the people supposed to support you, and how the power balance can shift in very frightening ways. How can you control a situation when you can’t speak?
The Silent House is Nell Pattison’s debut novel, and definitely worth a read for crime fans.
Claire Ormsby-Potter lives in the Midlands with her very patient husband and very neurotic cat. She's an early career editor, who wants to spend all her professional and leisure time with books, and particularly loves genre fiction. At some point she may have to stop buying books for the sake of space and money, but today is not that day.
