The Whisperer’s Game

By Donato Carrisi

Published by Little, Brown Book Group https://www.littlebrown.co.uk/

352 pages ISBN 9781408714591

Publication date 7 July 2022

I was allowed access to a pdf review copy on Net Galley.  Thanks to the author and publisher for organising this.

From the blurb

The phone call to the police arrives at dusk from an isolated farmhouse, fifty miles from the city. A terrified woman’s voice pleads for help. But a violent storm rages in the area and the first available patrol only succeeds in reaching her hours later. It is too late. Something perturbing has happened, something which leaves the investigators in the dark.

Just one person is able to reveal the message hidden behind this act of evil, but this person is no longer a policeman. She left her work as a missing persons investigator and withdrew from society to live an isolated existence beside a lake; her daughter Alice her only companion. Even so, when she is called upon to help with this case, Mila Vasquez cannot shirk her duty. The investigation involves her closely . . . more than she could ever believe.

It is a game and it has only just started.

Because he is always a step ahead.

Synopsis

Mila Vasquez is a former police officer, who worked in the missing persons department known as ‘Limbo’and has taken a step back away from outside contact and now lives in the countryside without internet or telephone connection. She is trying to protect her daughter, Alice, who doesn’t have a father figure as he is in a long-term coma. Mila suffers from alexithymia which means she has trouble in expressing her feelings and emotions to others and lacks the capacity for empathy.

One day the Chief of the Federal Police Department, Joanna Shutton, arrives unannounced and unexpected. She asks Mila to look at a case of the disappearance of a family after seemingly an attack by a stranger that results in a bloodbath at the scene. Their bodies haven’t been found but after a tip off they have arrested the man they believe responsible, who refuses to talk and is covered from head to toe with numbers tattooed into his skin. Mila refuses to help until she is told that he also has her name tattooed on his body.

Reluctantly she is drawn into the case and after trying to interview the man known as ‘Enigma’ she realises that he is a whisperer. Somewhat like Charles Manson he can persuade others to do his evil bidding including murder.

When Alice is kidnapped Mila is drawn into a battle with the unknown and with a virtual reality world she ill equipped to negotiate. She is aided by former colleague Simon Berish, who replaced her in Limbo, and a mysterious hacker Pascal, as she tries to negotiate between reality and the virtual reality of the computer simulation of Elsewhere. However, she comes to realise that she is dependent on people who she isn’t sure she can trust.

My thoughts

Some readers like their novels to be placed firmly within in a genre, whereas others think that is rather old fashioned. The Whisperer’s Game blurs the edges so much that it cannot be easily categorised. It starts off as a crime novel develops into a psychological thriller and then morphs into a Matrix-esque computer simulation, virtual reality thriller and then back again. Even the crime element is hard to pin down, it seems a bit Scandi-noir in style but there is no indication of location and many other aspects have US influences. All of this could have been a confused mess of a novel but we end up with a complex but largely cogent tale which is likely to appeal to fans of technology and sci-fi as much as crime readers.

The theme revolves around an experimentation of the interaction of real life with a computer game and what would happen if the violence that could be experienced within the game effected the way players lived their life outside. Would they live out violent and extreme fantasies?

The prose is intelligent without becoming too dense and there are thought provoking markers along the way; is it possible to withdraw from modern life, can one live off the grid and escape one’s past and are we sure all scientific research is in good faith.

There are some clever allusions to other works like the 23-story block that houses the prison where the higher the floor the worse the crime committed, like Dante’s inferno in reverse. There is the glass walled cell like in the film version of Silence of the Lambs and Enigma is a variation on Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man. The game is an old game and becomes more effective with the addition of a synthetic drug called ‘Angel’s Tears’ the pills being reminiscent of The Matrix. These are merely references though and as a whole the work is highly original.

The plot is both complex and twisty as it moves between real life and the computer simulation (described as ‘a fairground for fucking maniacs’) and then later as Mila discovers how she has been played by others. Mila is both a player within the game and essentially a pawn within something much bigger. Throughout there are tricks and bluffs to throw the reader off track and as Mila struggles with who to trust it is never clear what some characters motives are until the end.

The Whisperer’s Game is a bold cross over between crime and science fiction which will entertain readers of both and especially those who play video games.

The Whisperer’s Game can be purchased direct from the publisher here

The author

Donato Carrisi was born in 1973 in Martina Franca and now lives in Rome. After studying Law, he specialised in Criminology and Behavioural Science. He is a director as well as a screenwriter, for both television and cinema. He writes for the newspaper Il Corriere della Sera and he is the author of several bestselling international novels.