The Whisperer

There are any number of thoroughly entertaining police procedurals that have captured the popular imagination: CSI, Bones, and Criminal Minds immediately come to mind. Of course, these are produced for television, whose appeal is undeniably visual in nature. For the printed page, Donato Carrisi provides an entertaining take on the genre in his acclaimed novel, The Whisperer.

The novel's premise is straightforward: the discovery of six severed arms, all belonging to children, alerts law enforcement agents that there is a serial killer on the loose. In response, a special unit is assembled, consisting of a criminal profiler, an experienced interrogator, veteran policemen, and an agent with an expertise in finding missing children. But to catch the perpetrator, the team will have to be at their best, as they come to terms not just with the killer's complex and devious machinations -- frustrating the team by being a step ahead practically the entire way -- but with their own inner demons as well.

There's much to like in The Whisperer, which presents a very "big concept" thriller to readers that often satisfies. The novel's success owes in large part to the care that Carrisi takes to put readers in the heads of criminal profilers, based on his own background as a student of law and criminology. When it hits its stride, the novel is a real page-turner, one in which readers become emotionally invested in both the story and its characters, precisely because Carrisi ably captures the dynamic tension that must be present among those in such line of work.

Yet at the same time, it's equally clear that The Whisperer occasionally stumbles in execution. It's unfortunate, for instance, that Carrisi is deliberately vague about the story's setting. Certainly, the novel would have been more compelling if it were rooted somehow in actual places. But the story's main shortcoming is in the inexplicable twists that are often introduced. The most egregious of these is probably when a psychic is involved in the investigation, which really makes it difficult for readers to suspend their disbelief. Fortunately, such twists do eventually make sense in the context of that bigger picture that Carrisi obviously has for the novel, and therefore can be excused by even the most critical reader.

The Whisperer earned Donato Carrisi the prestigious Premio Bancarella literary award in 2009, and the novel has since been translated from its native Italian into several languages. It's not hard to see why: the book is a fine example of a psychological thriller that will appeal to fans not just of television police procedurals, but of traditional murder mysteries as well.

[This review is based on a pre-publication proof obtained through NetGalley.]