Name: The Whisper Man
Series: Stand Alone
Author: Alex North
Publisher: Penguin
Format: Paperback
Genres: Adult, Thriller, Mystery, Crime, Horror, Suspense
Spice Rating: None
Rating:
Synopsis: Goodreads
Still devastated after the loss of his wife, Tom Kennedy and his young son Jake move to the sleepy village of Featherbank, looking for a fresh start.
But Featherbank has a dark past. Fifteen years ago a twisted serial killer abducted and murdered five young boys. Until he was finally caught, the killer was known as ‘The Whisper Man’.
Of course, an old crime need not trouble Tom and Jake as they try to settle in to their new home. Except that now another boy has gone missing. And then Jake begins acting strangely.
He says he hears a whispering at his window…
Review:
Guys, this book. Let me tell you what this book did to me, because it is NOT easy for a book to do this. A movie or tv show, sure, but a book!? Every unexplained noise I heard while I was reading this book had me either checking over my shoulder or looking out my window. I read this book in one sitting, so I spent a good amount of hours made paranoid by this book. It was that good.
I haven’t read anything by Alex North, nor heard of Alex North. I picked up The Whisper Man because Steve Cavanagh wrote a glowing endorsement for it! Best crime novel of the decade? Sign me up. And I quite simply did not expect to love it that much. Mid review writing decision, I’m increasing the rating on The Whisper Man. I give out 5 stars a lot, I know that, but the way this book stuck with me definitely boosts it closer to the 5 star than the 4, so I’m amending it to be a 4.5 star rating. Let me explain!
We follow a number of POVs in this one, but the main three are Tom, Tom’s son Jake, and Pete the detective on the original Whisper Man case. Tom’s wife died, suddenly, and so he and his son move home because his son can’t even go up the stairs in the house they lived in because he saw her dead at the bottom of the stairs. They move to what sounds like a quaint place, Featherbank, but when they’re there, Jake starts acting strangely… Pete is asked to consult on a new case where the kidnappings have a connection to an old case that he worked – the missing child reported to his mother hearing a monster whispering at their windows in the lead up to their kidnapping. And what would you know it, Jake starts hearing the same thing…
Gosh, I can’t sing the praises for this book enough. My main gripe was there was an element of this book that feels really important, feels intergral, and yet it gets partially explained and then the other part just kind of gets explained away. That felt like a let down to me. But also, the pacing in SOME chapters was off, some of them felt slow. I never lost interest in what I was reading (clearly because I read it in one sitting!) but I did find myself actively thinking that it was slow on a number of occassions…
So, I think you don’t need to know much in order to go into this one. But as I said at the start, the atmosphere in this one creeped me out enough that the random noises my house makes and people who walk past the front of my house made… was enough that I was paranoid and creeped out too… 4.5 stars feels like a good choice – not 5 star feelings, or vibes, or perfection… but pretty damn close.
If you leave a door half-open, soon you’ll hear the whispers spoken…
Reading With Tyler 
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