Review | The Whisperer by Karin Fossum
Ragna Riegel works in a supermarket and still lives in her childhood home. She's alone in the world since her only son moved to Berlin. She longs for a Christmas or birthday card from him.
Ragna lives her life within strict self-imposed limits: she sits in the same seat on the bus every day, on her way to her predictable job. On her way home she always visits the same local shop. She feels safe in her routine, until one day she receives a letter with a threatening message scrawled in capital letters. An unknown enemy has entered her world and she must use all her means to defend herself.
When the worst happens, Inspector Konrad Sejer is called in to interrogate Ragna. Is this unassuming woman out of her depth, or is she hiding a dark secret?
This book was just not for me. I’m afraid it bored me.
My biggest problem with it was how long the book took to get from the beginning to the actual murder. The set up is that Ragna Reigel is being interrogated by Inspector Sejer, and the chapters alternate between her sitting in a room talking to him and her recollections of the events that led her there. This is a device that was used really effectively in Will Hill’s After the Fire, but just fell flat for me here because nothing exciting happened until we were three quarters of the way through the book. That’s how long it took for the murder to be talked about directly, because everything up until then was just boring quotidian nonsense from Reigel’s life.
I understand that this book is essentially a character study, and Reigel is fully realised and believable. She is a complete person, built intricately and at great length. I can see that the author knows what she is doing, but the balance and pace were just so wrong for me.
And the ending. I could see it coming, but it was so quick and disappointing that I asked myself why I’d bothered reading all the boring build-up for such a poor-quality pay-off. It just wasn’t worth it for me.
It seems to be a common adage in the psychological thriller business that you need three twists to keep an audience engaged these days. Is this really a thriller? I don’t think so, but it describes itself as psychological suspense, which seems like it’s in the same ballpark. Either way, to me, this book only really had two half twists. It is a slower, rambling beast of a book that failed - for me - to build any tension. It just wasn’t enough to keep me interested. I didn’t want to know what happened so much as I wanted it to end.
I just didn’t get it. Maybe I missed something. There was one twist I was expecting - about why she whispered - that never actually came. I had a theory about it, but it never shook out. I wonder if I was supposed to understand more from the author’s vague implications than I in fact did.
Perhaps I would have enjoyed it more if I had read the other books in the Inspector Sejer series, of which this is number 13, but I suspect they would all just fall short of the paciness and tension I’m looking for in a novel. What else can I say? It was an okay book, but not for me.
Recommended for: fans of slow-building Scandinavian psychological suspense.
Disclosure: The Gin Book Club received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher. This in no way affects the content of this review. This review is provided voluntarily and contains our honest opinion.
