Katie always looked after her beloved younger brother Chris – until she left him alone for one selfish afternoon, and their picture-perfect family fell apart.

Although Chris survived the attack, the scars ran deeper than the ones left across his face. Now they’re adults, and they haven’t spoken in years. Then she gets a call, from Detective Laurence Page.

Page is facing an unusually disturbing crime scene. Alan Hobbes, a distinguished and wealthy philosophy professor, has been brutally murdered. Hobbes was living in a sprawling mansion – but one that remains half-ruined by a decades-old fire, wind and rain howling through the gaping, creaking roof.

Page only has one suspect: Chris, caught on CCTV at the house. But he has plenty of questions. What could cause a man as wealthy as Hobbes not to repair his home? Why did he seem to know his death was coming, yet do nothing to stop it? And why was he obsessed with a legendary local serial killer?

But Katie only has one thing on her mind. She knows this is her last, best chance to finally save her brother, and make up for her negligence all those years ago.

But she can’t possibly imagine just how much danger he’s in…

My Review

I wondered if the reason I got so muddled reading this was because I tend to lose focus when listening to a book on Audible. In fact I listened to the last hour twice. But then I read other reviews and realised it’s not just me. It is a bit complicated and I couldn’t initially work out the relationships between Katie and her brother Chris, Edward Leland and Alan Hobbes, serial killer Jack Locke and Chris’s attacker Michael Hyde. I needed some kind of family tree or plan. But then that would have spoiled the ending. Because ‘everything is connected under the surface’, and that’s the whole premise of the book.

However, The Whisper Man is probably one of my all time favourite crime novels, so I persevered. As well as the connections, something else that is important is the concept of determinism – “the doctrine that all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by causes regarded as external to the will. Some philosophers have taken determinism to imply that individual human beings have no free will and cannot be held morally responsible for their actions.”

That is what drove serial killer Jack Locke to kill a number of children, making them into angels (hence the alternative book title The Angel Maker). He believed it was his destiny, as determined by God, and that he had to carry out the horrors foisted on him. He taught his sons to follow him, but while one did, the other rebelled, causing a massive split between the brothers.

In the meantime, Katie Shaw has to look after her brother, always walking him home from school. But Chris is fifteen. Why does he need a chaperone? So one day Katie decides to go home with her boyfriend instead and it’s on that very day that Chris is attacked and severely wounded, leaving him with facial scars. While he recovers physically, the psychological scars go much deeper. And Katie can never stop feeling guilty.

I’m not going to rewrite the synopsis as it tells you all you need to know, suffice to say that it is full of mystery and intrigue. We follow the separate threads of Katie and her family, Leland, Hobbes and Chris, wondering how it will all come together in the end, which it does, as this is a very clever writer and there are no loose ends. Once it does come together, it all seems relatively simple!

I’m still not sure whether to give it 4 or 5 stars and had I read it on Kindle I think it would have made a huge difference. It would have been much easier to go back an re-read the parts that I missed.

About the Author

Alex North was born in Leeds, where he now lives with his wife and son. The Whisper Man was inspired by North’s own little boy, who mentioned one day that he was playing with ‘the boy in the floor’. Alex North is a British crime writer who has previously published under another name.