Ten years ago, DCI Jack Logan stopped the serial child-killer dubbed ‘Mister Whisper,’ earning himself a commendation, a drinking problem, and a broken marriage in the process.

Now, he spends his days working in Glasgow’s Major Investigations Team, and his nights reliving the horrors of what he saw.

And what he did.

When another child disappears a hundred miles north in the Highlands, Jack is sent to lead the investigation and bring the boy home. But as similarities between the two cases grow, could it be that Jack caught the wrong man all those years ago?

And, if so, is the real Mister Whisper about to claim his fourth victim?

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I’ve had this book in and out of my kindle library for a few years. I never ended up reading it, so I kept removing it from my library. I finally found the time to sit down and read this, and I’m glad that I did because it kept me hooked on the edge of my seat for the duration.

The weather is horrible in the Southeast today, and it is definitely low air pressure migraine weather, which, as expected, has made my head very sore and my mood very grumpy. I read this book over two days, and overall, I found it riveting and the characters to be connectable. There was a little element that did make me a little green around the gills, but that’s more of a personal preference that I tend to avoid as much as possible, so I won’t necessarily hold it against this book.

I was, I suppose, slightly hesitant to read this book because the blurb hints at a serial child killer, and this narrative is something that I find walks a very fine line between delivering it to justice versus delivering something that makes you feel sick and unsteady.

This book does have ‘unknown’ p.o.v. chapters, and usually we expect these chapters to be in the mindset of the killer being pursued. Here, that wasn’t the case, but it did take me a while to realise that, and though I made many attempts to guess the voice and had many theories about it, I was bamboozled in the end. Having finished the book and knowing what I know now, I wonder how I didn’t previously think about it. But I guess that is the mark of a good ‘twist and turn’.

DCI Jack Logan is the main character of this book/series. He comes across as a well-weathered man who has seen everything under the sun in his time on the force. He can be surly, smart, and rash. He exhibits good policing throughout, but he also reminds the reader that he is human and can make mistakes.

As the blurb would suggest, DCI Logan is brought into an investigation that is eerily like the serial child-killer he brought to justice 10 years ago. As you can imagine, this makes his character electrically charged throughout the book, and a lot of his actions that would perhaps be deemed ‘inappropriate’ in other police investigations are almost muted given his history with the case 10 years ago. He is by no means a ‘wild card’ or ‘without morals’, but it is interesting to see his head space as the story unravels.

Sometimes I find that the main investigator of a series is either too passionate or too gruff in their manner. Often coming off as too much or too little. At the beginning, I thought maybe DCI Logan would fall into the latter category with his gruff voice and no-nonsense attitude, but he surprised me and proved me rather wrong. I think his character is a good balance between the two.

While the character of DCI Logan primarily works in Glasgow’s Major Investigations Team, for this case he is sent up to the Highlands, where the policing team is, I imagine, rather different. He interacts with an older colleague and forms bridges with new characters in both positive and negative ways. As a team, they worked cohesively, and there wasn’t a moment when one character pulled hard against another. It was a smooth flowing partnership between all.

It was also enjoyable, and not all that expected, to have brief glimpses into the thoughts of the other characters. The characters in this book, aside from DCI Logan, I suspect are contained in this one book, so getting a glimpse into their working minds wasn’t something I expected but allowed me into the group a little more and to understand the dynamics further.

There were many characters in this book that I suspected, and yet when it came down to it, I only twigged the real suspect, maybe a page or two before the reveal. It felt shocking but also acceptable, like there was no other option for it to be. Not the safe option by far, but an option that made sense for the journey the plot had been taking. I was surprised by some of the elements.

Other than a brief visit to Edinburgh in 2023, I have little knowledge of Scotland outside of reading novels, so I am always prepared to be a little off kilter and lacking knowledge when I read books set there. However, while reading this, it was so easy to be able to picture what was happening within my mind. I could clearly see the characters and the places of description. I even got a semi-clear Scottish voice running around my head.

I also enjoyed that the story wrapped itself up neatly but didn’t just leave it there. There was a little extra, which just made the ending feel more concrete and gave the reader a proper finish without any loose ends. Rather than just ending the book with the capture of the criminal.

I read this on kindle, and as I said, it took me two evenings to enjoy. The book is just over 300 pages on kindle. I only made one highlight while reading this. It’s a long one but it was at a point that was crucial to DCI Logan’s ability to unravel who was behind the crime and it was the turning point for one final theory to reveal itself inside my mind:

‘He’d had a suspicion before. No, not a suspicion, a concern. A dread. A nagging fear that ate away at him some nights when he lay awake and wormed its way into his nightmares while he slept. He had always dismissed it, pushed it away, beaten it down. It didn’t make sense. He refused to let it make sense. And yet, it did. Here, now, it was perhaps the only thing that did, and the realisation of that fact knocked the air from Logan’s lungs and threatened to bring him to his knees. Someone connected to the original case.’