5 Stars
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group – Ballantine, Bantam
Date of publication: November 21, 2017
Genre: General Fiction, Mystery, Thriller
Number of pages: 528
POV: 3rd person
Series: Jane Hawk
The Silent Corner – Book 1 (review here)
The Whispering Room – Book 2
The Crooked Staircase – Book 3 (expected publication date: June 2018)
Where you can find The Whispering Room: Amazon | Barnes and Noble
Book synopsis (from Goodreads):
Jane Hawk–fiction’s most relentless, resourceful, stunning new heroine–continues her battle against a murderous conspiracy in the riveting sequel to The Silent Corner.
“No time to delay. Do what you were born to do. Fame will be yours when you do this.”
These are the words that ring in the mind of mild-mannered, beloved schoolteacher Cora Gundersun–just before she takes her own life, and many others’, in a shocking act of carnage. When the disturbing contents of her secret journal are discovered, it seems certain that she must have been insane. But Jane Hawk knows better.
In the wake of her husband’s inexplicable suicide–and the equally mysterious deaths of scores of other exemplary individuals–Jane picks up the trail of a secret cabal of powerful players who think themselves above the law and beyond punishment. But these ruthless people bent on hijacking America’s future for their own monstrous ends never banked on a highly trained FBI agent willing to go rogue–and become the nation’s most wanted fugitive–in order to derail their insidious plans to gain absolute power with a terrifying technological breakthrough.
Driven by love for her lost husband and by fear for the five-year-old son she has sent into hiding, Jane Hawk has become an unstoppable predator. Those she is hunting will have nowhere to run when her shadow falls across them.
Trigger warning: None
My review:
If you had read my review of The Silent Corner, then you know how much of a Dean Koontz fan I am. Not going to bore you with that here but I did do my fangirl routine when I got accepted for the ARC of The Whispering Room. My husband, the poor man, got the brunt of it. He could care less about what I read or my favorite authors. He got an earful about how excited I was about reading the book.
What tickled me about this book was that two of the secondary characters had names I was very familiar with. Luther’s wife name was Rebecca (my 12year old’s name) and his daughter’s name was Jolie (my name). My name is never used in anything, I can count on one hand the number of times I have seen it in a book. I was pretty surprised and excited to see it on such a kick-ass character. I was also pretty amused that the names were reversed with Rebecca being the mother and Jolie being the daughter.
The Whispering Room starts off with a bang. A special education teacher, named Cora Gundersun, does the unthinkable. She drives her car, full of gas and on fire, into a historic hotel where the governor was celebrating its reopening. The sheriff, Luther Tillman, is shocked. This was not the Cora that he knew and was friends with. When the feds muscle in and take over, Luther feels that something is not right. When he reads Cora’s diary, he gets a feeling of unease. But, when her house mysteriously goes up in flames, he decides to look into it. After talking to another old friend, he finds that Cora hasn’t been right since a trip to Iron Furnace. A trip that she one for being teacher of the year. A trip that she came home from with no memories and migraines. Luther decides that he needs to investigate and does it only telling Rebecca and Jolie where he is going.
While all this is going down in Minnesota, Jane is still in California. She is trying to get to David James Michael, the man who called for the death of her husband. Jane’s husband had been injected with nanomachine control mechanisms and then was programmed to kill himself. She goes to an award-winning journalist, hoping he would help her. Instead, she finds out that he is in the pocket of David James Michael and his company, Far Horizons. But, he did give her a lead. He leads her to Randall Larkin, a lawyer associated with Far Horizon. Randall, in turn, leads her to Iron Furnace.
When Luther arrives in Iron Furnace, he realizes that there is something off about the place. Everyone is too happy, too willing to help. Then he meets Jane and is filled with what exactly is going on in that town. After rescuing several children from a prison made up of the programmed townspeople, Jane and Luther take them to a safe place in Texas. Then Jane goes after David James Michael. Luther stays with the children but he has told Rebecca, Jolie and their other daughter Twyla that they need to go off the radar until he can get to them.
But things don’t go as planned. Things happen that change and test people.
Jane was the ultimate ghost in this book. There was nothing that she couldn’t do to get caught. Her devotion to bringing David James Michael to justice for Nick’s death has surprising results. It is those results that changed who she was going after. I loved how strong she was. I also liked how vulnerable she was too. She was doing everything in her power to protect Travis, her 5-year-old son. I worry that Travis is going to become a liability in the next few books. While he is safe where she stashed him, I do wish that she would bring him to Texas. He would be safer there.
I loved Luther. He wasn’t afraid to go after the truth and he was smart enough to understand that he needed to go after it on the down low. I hope that more of him and his family are in the next book because I enjoyed reading about them.
The end of The Whispering Room was fantastic and terrifying. I was on edge the entire end of the book. I cannot wait to read The Crooked Staircase!! I need to see what happens to everyone in book 2 and see where book 3 takes me!!
I enjoyed reading The Whispering Room. Dean Koontz did a great job of drawing me into the story and not letting me come up for breath until the end. I was kept on edge the entire book, not know what will happen next. The plot was fantastic and the characters were 3D. This book is not one that you can read alone, though. You do need to read The Silent Corner to keep up with the lightning fast events in The Whispering Room.
Will I reread: Yes
Will I recommend to family and friends: Yes
Age range: Adult
Why: Language and violence
I would like to thank Dean Koontz, Random House Publishing Group, Bantam and NetGalley for allowing me to read and review The Whispering Room.
All opinions stated in this review of The Whispering Room are mine.
**I chose to leave this review after reading an advance reader copy**
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