The Whisper Man - Alex North

In Featherank, 5 boys disappeared only 4 bodies were found, Frank Carter was arrested and convicted. A case that will haunt Detective Pete Willis for a long time.

20 years later, the boy disappears, detective Willis is haunted by the ghosts of the past due to similarities with the case he worked on 20 years ago, detective Amanda Beck is in a race against time, and widower Tom Kennedy moves to Featherbank with his son Jake. For the two of them, it is a new beginning and a way to cope with the loss of their mother and wife. At least that's what Tom thinks, because soon after the move, Jake starts behaving strangely, talking to imaginary friends more and more often and drawing scary drawings...

All of them, and even the late wife who is only a ghost in this book, are connected in a strange way. That connection that will lead to resolution and redemption for some of them.

It is a well-known fact that with at the beginning of the pandemic of the virus, which name wich I will not write on purpose, I fell into reader's block. Last summer, thrillers really helped me getout of it, so now I'm very happy to return to them and enjoy reading them.

The Whisper Man is a book that has recently joined my growing collection of thrillers. All of us bookworms/dragons/nerds/geeks (whatever you like) have endless TBR lists that we won't finish in two lifetimes and we're trying to stick to some sort of reading order. And then certain novel appears that simply has to be read straight through. For me it was The Whisper Man. He's been calling me from the shelf since I adopted him a few weeks ago. I took it, made a coffee, stretched out in my favorite armchair and walked into Featherbank. And honestly, I didn't regret it a bit.

The story drew me in at first. The plot is interesting, the characters are picturesque, but the outcome is somewhat expected. From the very beginning, I was bothered by the switching of the narration from the first to the third person. Tom's reactions to Jake's imaginary friends and outbursts at school were understandable to me, as the man is clearly suffering from depression due to the loss of his wife and inability to cope with the role of a single father to a slightly strange child. The relationship between the murderer Frank Carter and the detective Willis is pure cliché - the killer playing cat and mouse with the one who put him behind bars. The fact that only halfway through the book, I could already guess who the new Whisperer was, even though the detectives were pretending to be crazy about it, did not detract from my enjoyment of the read. That kind of mysticism that permeates the novel gives it a special touch. There are moments when you're not sure if little Jake is really seeing ghosts or just imagining it.

However,  the mistakes in Serbian translation of the novel drove me crazy. Whether it's a translation (which I sincerely doubt) or one of my worst enemies proofreading, I don't know and I don't want to go into details. For example, translation of word exhausted sounded to me like a word that my late grandmother, who never left her village, where she finished 4 grades of elementary school, would have used.

Still, despite all its faults and flaws, I liked The Whisper Man. I "swallowed" it in two days. So, if you need an interesting book to read quickly, this is definitely one of them.