I’ve recently just finished The Whisper Man by Alex North. I picked it up the day I was leaving Adelaide to read on the plane. When I look for books in stores, I look at the covers. If I like the cover and the title, I’ll start reading it, if I keep reading after the first page then I want to read it. It hasn’t happened recently but it did with this book.

When I started reading The Whisper Man, I was intrigued by the type of story I expected from the book. I don’t read a lot of crime but I do like eerie crime, whether I’m watching it or reading it. The first thing I noticed when I was reading was that the style was easy to read and the text was big, meaning that the book wasn’t too long. So I started reading it two weeks ago. Two weeks to finish a book isn’t impressive, especially when I compare it to how much and how fast I used to read as a kid but this is the fastest I’ve read a book in about seven years. It had been a long time since I was transported by writing. I’d almost forgotten what it felt like but definitely experienced it with The Whisper Man.

My only criticisms of The Whisper Man is that sometimes the writing seemed amateur. Parts of it were very poetic and then some parts seemed like they’d been thrown in for the sake of character movement and never revised. It crinkled my nose a lot, but I feel like it did help how easy it was to read. It felt commercial in places. The story was hooking enough, and so it was very easy to forgive the strange errors and parts of text that didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the book.

One thing I really loved about the book, other than the story itself, was the characterisation of the individual characters and how their expressions and feelings were described, particularly with Francis at the end of the novel.

I also felt like the plot and pace was done really well. It was never too fast and never too slow and nothing ever seemed too far fetched. Sometimes I’ll watch or read something where the number of coincidences to tie in several aspects of the story are overwhelming and get to the point of predictable and stop being unique and surprising, but I didn’t feel annoyed or tired at any of the points where these ‘coincidences’ happened. I only ever felt tired with Tom Kennedy, but not having any relation to this character, I can’t really comment on the way he behaved or thought, I just know that I found him a little irritating.

I don’t want to spoil this novel at all but there are so many small scenes that I want to talk about, which I think is something to say in itself. I enjoyed it and that’s what I feel like is most important.

Again, I want to re-iterate, I don’t see myself as a critic. I don’t think I have enough knowledge or am widely read enough to judge the work of others, these book reviews are literally just my review of the book. What I liked, what I didn’t and if I thought the book was good. I don’t really have a rating system but I would definitely recommend this book if you don’t mind this type of story/genre.

Don’t read past here if you don’t want any potential spoilers.

I was excited about the butterfly. It’s on the cover and on the bones and I was convinced that it was going to be extremely important, and then it was forgotten about and not really used. And then- BAM- it was back and it was the most significant part of the story. I loved how it was done subtly. Tom thought about the butterfly quite a bit but there weren’t any “look at the butterfly” “the butterfly is the key” throughout the story, leading to me to gradually forget about it and think it was just some kind of motif or red herring.

The final scene between Frank and Francis made me uncomfortable, which I see as an accomplishment to the writing. I was so conflicted about the scene because of how I felt about Frank and Francis and what they had done individually, and how strangely beautifully horrifying the scene was. Especially that last line. The story could have ended there and I still would have been satisfied. I turned the page thinking “holy sh*t that’s sad”. Francis was wrong and he was depicted poetically creepy but at the end of the day, I definitely had some form of sympathy for him. What was also startling was that Francis was punished and yet I feel like Frank never was. And that’s a cold slice of truth handed out by reality.