Hush, hush, whisper who dares
THE WHISPER MAN by Alex North (Michael Joseph £12.99, 400 pp)
THIS is a creepy story from a former sociology teacher that explores the relationships between fathers and sons. It’s based around a jailed serial killer who appears to have a copycat, or perhaps an accomplice, who escaped justice.
Tom Kennedy and his young son Jake move to the village of Featherbank, struggling to cope with the sudden death of their wife and mother.
What they don’t know is that the village — and house — they’ve chosen have a terrifying history. When Jake tells his father about whispers he hears at the window at night, Tom discovers that, 15 years earlier, a serial killer known locally as The Whisper Man abducted and murdered five young boys.
Now another boy has gone missing, and Jake’s stories of the man whispering takes on a frightening new dimension.
With the movie rights already sold to Hollywood, Alfred Hitchcock would have loved every spine-chilling moment.
JOE COUNTRY by Mick Herron (John Murray £14.99, 352 pp)
JACKSON LAMB, the overweight, chain-smoking anti-hero at the heart of Herron’s stories about ‘slow horses’, ie spooks who are on the scrapheap, is the 21st-century version of George Smiley.
He is vulgar, brash, rude and never respectful of authority, but still manages to nurse the best out of no-hopers who have been rejected by MI5 bosses and sent to serve out their time under his command at Slough House.
There is none of Smiley’s elegant diplomacy about Lamb, nor his serpentine ability to see every side of the story, but Herron’s character does see the lies that serve the spy-masters and threaten the security of the country.
Yet Herron does not seek to be John le Carre — his is a wryer, more ironic style; faster, more down to earth, with rapid prose that grabs you by the throat. If you haven’t read him yet, do so now.
THE VAN APFEL GIRLS ARE GONE by Felicity McLean (Point Blank £14.99, 304 pp)
AN ENTRANCING, melancholy debut from a young Australian that evokes the country and its climate as the background to a mystery about what happened to the three young Van Apfel sisters, who disappeared two decades ago.
It’s told through the eyes of the girls’ friend, the then 11-year-old Tikka, who lives across their cul-de-sac in an isolated suburb, surrounded by bush and close to the edge of a gorge and lake.
The landscape is superbly captured, but it is the relationship between Tikka and the sisters that lingers.
There is a poignancy to the descriptions of what it means to be a girl on the edge of adulthood, the jealousies, friendships, secret plans and private jokes, that feels unerring and true.
Did the girls run away, or was there something far more sinister afoot?
The mystery that has haunted her for 20 years unravels in a series of flashbacks as Tikka, now 31, returns to her home town in the wake of her sister’s illness. Mesmerising.