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The Whisperers

John Connolly
Atria Books/Simon & Schuster, Inc. (2010)
ISBN 9781439165195
Reviewed by Rita Grasshoff for RebeccasReads (10/10)


Charlie Parker is a rough-playing, irreverent, disgraced private detective and the lead character in John Connolly’s “The Whisperers.”  Parker is hired by Bennett Patchett to find out if Patchett’s employee, Karen Emory, is physically abused by her boyfriend, a former soldier who recently returned from service in Iraq.  Parker quickly realizes that Patchett's real goal is to find out how and why his own son, also a former solider who served in Iraq with Emory’s boyfriend, committed suicide.

Unfortunately, none of these characters were as well-developed as they could and should have been, and as a result it was difficult to care about them and empathize with their thoughts and feelings. For example, much more information is needed about the Karen Emory character to understand why her safety was apparently so much more important than that of other characters.  And Charlie’s two armed killers, “friends” whom he could call to help him, were so undeveloped that many readers will probably have a difficult time having any sympathy or understanding for them as they killed the bad-guy killers.  Perhaps these and other characters have be previously and better developed in previous books of the Charlie Parker series, but this issue would seem to be a considerable challenge for readers with no previous experience with the series.

On the other hand, the book in many other areas bogged down in an overabundance of needless detail that tends to pull the reader away on unfortunate tangents without offering value to the story. Do readers of a self-described “thriller” really want or need to read almost three pages just to describe a bar that Parker went to to get information?

The storyline, which struggled, is another concern. The book seemed to be a patchwork of pieced together bits of storylines with gory action and gratuitous killing -- with no apparent consequences for the killers -- and a very small amount of “voices,” which served as the supernatural element of the story.

That said, Connolly shows some writing promise, with an easy to-follow writing style. He’s obviously a first rate researcher as well, evidenced by the extensive use and references to information about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, giving readers good insights into the seldom-seen challenges that confront soldiers returning from battle.