The Whisper Man

I decided to try Alex North's, a pseudonym of a British author who has published fiction novels in the past, debut crime book, titled The Whisper Man, mainly due to the hype that surrounded it and the many rave reviews in social media and crime fiction blogs and magazines. Whenever I hold high expectations for a book or movie etc., I usually end up disappointed as the result seems always to be, more or less, significantly less entertaining than I've imagined. Fortunately, The Whisper Man proved to be an exception of the above rule and I can say that I thoroughly enjoyed the novel which is a blend of traditional crime fiction sub-genres like a police procedural, murder mystery, whodunit, and others.

The story is narrated by multiple points of view, one of them being the actual villain's/antagonists' perspective, and the main protagonist is a fiction writer, Tom Kennedy, who moves along with his teenage son Jake to a new house in the village of Featherbank. They both suffered a tragedy when Tom's wife and Jake's mother, Rebecca, died because of a heart attack and they want to begin again from scratch. But soon, Tom finds out that the house he chooses to move in has a shady past and when he finds human bones buried underneath his garage, the story will be linked with Frank Carter, a notorious murderer of small children, whose media-invented nickname is The Whisper Man, and his past crimes. Frank is now in prison, though he seems to know a lot more than he is willing to tell.

North choose Tom to be the only first-person narrator in the book, perhaps because he felt an affinity to him as an author and maybe as an overall character. The multiple POV is used masterfully, thus the tempo of the novel is quick, without ever being confusing, while the climax is full of twists and dramatic events. The only problem with The Whisper Man is that it leaves you asking for more. In my opinion, it is one of the best novels in the genre for 2019. I recommend it unreservedly to all the loyal fans of well-written crime fiction around the world.