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Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
Donato Carrisi studied law and criminology before he began working as a writer for television. The Whisperer , Carrisi's first novel, won five international literary prizes, has been sold in nearly twenty countries, and has been translated into languages as varied as French, Danish, Hebrew and Vietnamese. Carrisi lives in Rome.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
An unorthodox cop joins forces with an elite investigative team led by a brilliant profiler in Carrisi's intriguing if overly plotted debut. "Somewhere near W.," in "an absurd woodland cemetery," Italian police officers, including Mila Vasquez, who excels at finding missing children, examine a makeshift grave. Five missing girls, ages seven to 13, appear to have been murdered, though the six severed left arms in the grave leave one missing child unaccounted for. The close-knit team, headed by criminologist Dr. Goran Gavila, home in on a suspect, but it all seems too easy. While the man is clearly guilty of a crime, he may not be the serial killer they've christened "Albert," thus setting off an elaborate cat-and-mouse game between the real killer and his pursuers. Familiar crime thriller tropes include the damaged cop and the haunted profiler, but Carrisi spins an engagingly gruesome tale. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
Italian author Carrisi's debut novel starts grisly - with the discovery of the severed arms of six children carefully arranged in a circle in a forest clearing - and gets more so. No indication is given as to the location of this atrocity, so that, unlike the two books above, this Euro-bestseller lacks a sense of place. Although this was clearly a deliberate decision, the mish-mash of cultural references - which point sometimes to Europe and sometimes to America - and the characters with multi-ethnic names proved a continual irritant. The investigators, traumatised officer Mila Vasquez and intuitive criminologist Goran Gavila, seem equally rootless and generic, and it takes some time for them to come alive as characters. However, despite these handicaps and a clod-hopping translation, which sometimes results in unintended humour, The Whisperer is a gripping read, and I defy anyone to guess the denouement. Italian author Carrisi's debut novel starts grisly - with the discovery of the severed arms of six children carefully arranged in a circle in a forest clearing - and gets more so. - Laura Wilson.
Kirkus Review
Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Who is playing with whom in this exquisitely gruesome thriller? Five young girls have gone missing. Six severed arms belonging to young girls are unearthed in a forest hideaway burial ground. Headed by criminologist Goran Gavila, the crime unit staff in this nameless, featureless, quasi-European country invite into their midst a stranger, missing-children expert Mila Vasquez, to help them solve the mystery. But someone is controlling their actions and playing with their minds-and with the plot of this gripping, disturbing novel (a European best seller), in which nothing is as it appears. Italian screenwriter and first-time novelist Carrisi obviously owes a debt to American crime-scene TV drama, but even more to Thomas Harris (The Silence of the Lambs), with homage from tone to gore to cover art. Verdict This is a novel about serial killers and as such is more about the manipulative process than the particulars; readers who appreciate manipulation, both of plots and themselves, by the author, and those who appreciate a shock of bloody horror will be absolutely enthralled by this offering. [See Prepub Alert, 7/10/11.]-David Clendinning, West Virginia State Univ. Lib., Institute (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
