The Whisperer by Donato Carrisi ISBN: 9780316207874
Series: Mila Vasquez #1
on January 5, 2012
Genres: Thriller
Pages: 432
Format: Hardcover
Goodreads | The StoryGraph
Amazon, Bookshop.org, Better World Books, Book Depository
A gripping literary thriller and smash bestseller that has taken Italy, France, Germany and the UK by storm.
Six severed arms are discovered, arranged in a mysterious circle and buried in a clearing in the woods. Five of them appear to belong to missing girls between the ages of eight and eighteen. The sixth is yet to be identified. Worse still, the girls' bodies, alive or dead, are nowhere to be found.
Lead investigators Mila Vasquez, a celebrated profiler, and Goran Gavila, an eerily prescient criminologist, dive into the case. They're confident they've got the right suspect in their sights until they discover no link between him and any of the kidnappings except the first. The evidence in the case of the second missing child points in a vastly different direction, creating more questions than it answers.
Vasquez and Gavila begin to wonder if they've been brought in to take the fall in a near-hopeless case. Is it all coincidence? Or is a copycat criminal at work? Obsessed with a case that becomes more tangled and intense as they unravel the layers of evil, Gavila and Vasquez find that their lives are increasingly in each other's hands.
The Whisperer, as sensational a bestseller in Europe as the Stieg Larsson novels, is that rare creation: a thought-provoking, intelligent thriller that is also utterly unputdownable.
I’m going to have to forego reviewing this per the CAWPILE method, because I finished it 2 weeks before writing this, and I just don’t have a sharp enough memory to break things down. But I can tell you this: I really liked it. The Whisperer is translated from its original Italian (I think?) and because of that, some of the conversational pacing can feel odd. However, there’s a real gem in non-English thrillers in that the author’s expectation of how things unfold and what a reader finds satisfying tend to surprise our expectations.
The murders are grim and dark, the cops are always one step behind (which becomes more suspicious, the deeper the novel goes), and the story of the MC unfolds as the serial killer mystery she’s helping investigates unfolds. You know I like my thrillers psychologically dark and twisty, and this one has that in spades. The MC also thinks she’s a sociopath (no empathy), which I found fascinating because I, too, went through a “am I incapable of empathy” exploration of myself. And, of course, every character in here is morally grey.
The author has clearly studied criminology, and the afterword has a nicely laid out explanation for the backbone of the Big Bad in the novel. It’s based off several real events, which gave me chills, but even when the danger feels impossibly cunning, the MC’s social awkwardness keeps the story from becoming too impossible.
Overall, I recommend it for fans of psychological thrillers and serial killers. I know I’ll be continuing the series, if I can find it in English, because I really connected with Mila and want to see how this cat-and-mouse game unfolds.
Leave a Reply