The Whisper Man

The cruelty of serial killers can feel a tad unnecessary when we are perfectly capable of bringing misery to our lives ourselves. Their evil can get a bit excessive, you see: the world would still be a harrowing, unjust, and vicious place without doctors killing and eating people or anonymous dudes sending puzzles to the police. We wouldn’t exactly be short on misery and despair, it’s what I’m saying. And that’s maybe why some people struggle to come to grips with their existence while others become transfixed by them: psychopaths like Hannibal Lecter seem alien in a sense, although much like CEOs, they still are utterly human.

The Whisper Man is Frank Carter, a sadist who used to kidnap and kill little boys until Pete Willis caught him and sent him to jail. Unlike Carter, Pete didn’t physically harm kids, but his son still bears the psychological marks of the time the detective had a few drinks, got home angry, and assaulted his wife. Carter’s existence is a constant source of anxiety for Pete, as to this day the detective hasn’t uncovered where the serial killer hid the remains of his last victim, but Pete’s life would still be quite miserable without Carter in it. His son and wife are long lost to him, and Pete blames himself, blames the drink, and much like anyone who has failed their loved ones, has turned hollow, incapable of feeling a shred of happiness: “He was a man made of air. A life with no heft. There was nothing good in his past that could be saved, and nothing in his future that was worth trying to.”

Many years have passed since Carter’s arrest, and life has lost all its luster for Pete, who’s just going through the motions, adrift, trying to go on for no bigger reason than that simply being “what things do. Even in the toughest of circumstances, they keep living.” But another abduction happens in the quiet town of Featherbank:  someone took Neil Spencer when he was walking home alone one night – in a manner very similar to Carter’s MO – and now Pete must help detective Amanda Beck catch the culprit while trying to uncover the unexpected connection with the Whisper Man’s case.

Meanwhile, Tom Kennedy is a writer in grief who has just moved to Featherbank after his wife passed away. He has a strained relationship with his son, Jake, who – to Tom’s constant dismay – keeps talking to people who aren’t there. The Bruce Willis that lives inside of us provides a simple answer to what’s happening with little Jake, regarding the nature of what he sees, but there’s no Willis inside Tom, just skepticism and annoyance, for he has no patience for this kind of thing:

“I lost my temper a little. I knew it was wrong even as I did, because the truth was that I wasn’t really angry with him. It was just the situation. Irritation that things hadn’t gone as well as I’d hoped. Disappointment that his imaginary friend had returned. Concern about what the other children would think and how they would treat him. Eventually I fell into a silence of my own, and we walked alongside each other like strangers.”

The distance Tom feels to his only son grows each passing day, and that’s just Tom’s fault, as he rarely tries to close that distance. He keeps Jake at arm’s length with the excuse that the boy doesn’t like him anyway, so he’s just giving him some space, letting him be comfortable. But Jake is not comfortable. He’s seven and has not only lost his mother, but was the one who discovered the body. He’s in a new town, in a new house – which functions like the setting of a horror movie, with all its strange creaks, looming presence, and gloomy aura – and he’s talking to a girl who isn’t there, a girl who’s cautioning him to never be alone, lest something really bad is going to happen. Jake’s afraid and Tom leaves him alone.

But can we blame Tom for not pulling himself together? Losing someone very dear to you is much like “a hammer blow to the head of life, scrambling all coherent thought. After that, there would only ever be static.” He has a son to take care of, yes, but grief is not a choice; it’s an everlasting reaction, and it has left him bereft, as lonely as Jake: they both needed someone else to extend a helping hand, and they were both left there, by themselves, hanging by a thread. Tom may be doing his best by Jake, then, but as it’s often the case, our best is not enough. So, he’s left in a very similar state to Pete Willis, hopeless, numb, believing that tomorrow “is always a new day, but there’s never any reason to think it will be a better one.”

In sum, Pete, Tom, and Jake don’t need someone like Frank Carter in their lives for them to be dreadful. In many ways, they’re already in their own private hells, but alas, someone just like Frank Carter is lurking in the shadows of Featherbank. The book’s opening paragraph points out how danger is more probable to come from within than from without, how we should worry more about violent fathers than about being eaten by connoisseurs of classical music:

“The abduction of a child by a stranger is every parent’s worst nightmare. But statistically it is a highly unusual event. Children are actually most at risk of harm and abuse from a family member behind closed doors, and while the outside world might seem threatening, the truth is that most strangers are decent people, whereas the home can be the most dangerous place of all. The man stalking six-year-old Neil Spencer across the waste ground understood that only too well.”

Unlike Frank Carter, who is a shallow, attention-seeking, sadistic prick – his scenes with Pete echo Silence of the Lambs, but Carter is not nearly as fascinating as Hannibal Lecter – the new villain is conflicted about his actions. When he stalks Neil Spencer, there’s empathy in his point of view, for he’s looking at Neil not as prey, but as a fully-fledged human being… in need of help.

“The man had looked. It wasn’t hard to see. Neil had spent today at his father’s house. His mother and father were separated, which the man considered a good thing. Both parents were alcoholics, functioning to wavering degrees. Both found life considerably easier when their son was at the other’s house, and both struggled to entertain him when he was with them. In general, Neil was left to occupy and fend for himself, which obviously went some way toward explaining the hardness the man had seen developing in the boy. “

Unlike Carter, this new kidnapper is not a heartless psychopath. If he considered it a good thing that Neil’s parents were divorced, it was not because that would make it easier for him to abduct the poor boy, but because together they would do much harm to the kid. He cares for Neil, and he intends to help in his own twisted way, but unfortunately – for Neil – he can’t help himself: he’s a broken man breaking people in a desperate attempt to fix them.

There are some who are inevitably drawn to violence, to the cathartic release it usually provides, but some are content with just admiring it from a distance. Norman Collins is a conspicuous, sinister character who Tom meets early on. His precise intentions are not clear at first for us, but Tom immediately gets the sense that – despite the man’s polite manners and pristine clothes – there’s something off with him, something eerie. Killers like Carter want to be seen, and Norman is more than willing to be the witness.

The Whisper Man flirts with horror in several scenes, sometimes tapping into the supernatural with Jake’s imaginary friends and sometimes through some more grounded –  but no less haunting –  imagery, such as the scene where Jake is softly talking with a man through the front door and a hand slowly appears through the mail slot.

Finally, the book is mostly narrated in the third person, but in Tom’s chapters it shifts to a first-person account of events, which can be quite jarring and unnecessary: there’s little to be gained from having Tom in the first-person, as the omniscient narrator also has access to each character’s innermost thoughts and feelings.

The Whisper Man, then, is a potent thriller, fueled by its many tormented characters in search of some relief for their desperation, some through barbaric acts of violence, but others through touching displays of love. And some – poor Neil – through both. Life doesn’t need serial killers to be harrowing and unfair – our own poor choices and the occasional accident more than take care of that – but at least they make for compelling stories.

July 28, 2026.