mina's Reviews > Šaptač

This is the reason I don’t do re-reads. First time I read this I loved it (assuming by the five stars I gave it), but now it was an average read for me and I had some issues with it. This review will contain spoilers.

At first I had problems getting into the story and the writing, but that could’ve been the result of noisy background. The writing turned out to be good however the plot started being a mess towards the end and it had some real questionable things happening.

Let’s start with the whole team before I go complain about individual characters. They are cardboards. Every character is given their role and besides that they are not explored more, and of course there’s the repetition of something about the character: Stern always has neat suits and menthol bonbons; Boris is friendly and a great interrogator; Sara Rosa is a bitch that doesn’t like Mila; Goran is a mastermind and know-it-all; Roche is an attention seeking boss who doesn’t have the respect of his team. And now to the spoilery bit. One of the team members being corrupted I could understand and it would be a good play, but throwing basically every team member under the bus didn’t sit right with me, albeit Boris was framed and wasn’t really guilty…but still.

Mila. Hmm, I don’t know, I wasn’t that fond of her to be honest. As someone who has high ratings for what she does best she’s treated like a newbie police officer when she joins Gavila’s team; I would assume different divisions function differently however they treat her like she never was at a crime scene (could be true) and she didn’t know any of the procedures (seems a bit unlikely since she is a police officer) and like she hadn’t had to connect dots to find missing kids. Also, since we are mentioning missing kids that are Mila’s specialty, her search for the sixth girl was thin. As someone that was brought in because of the children aspect of the case she spent most of the time doing the same work as her teammates—searching for Albert.

Her lack of empathy was interesting… only I don’t know if it was executed well, just something didn’t feel fully right but that could be because I didn’t completely understand her situation. However I’m interested to know how a person with that condition got into police, it seems like something that is needed especially since she compared her lack of empathy with a psychopath.

Her infatuation with Goran was… what? That came out of nowhere for me and it was unnecessary in my opinion. I know what it brings for the sequel, but that’s where it goes into the farfetched territory too which I will mention in the Whisperer’s part down below.

Goran. I don’t know what his team saw in him. It’s told he’s very good at his work and I don’t feel like I saw him doing his magic, he gave me an omnipresent vibe and to be honest the team acted like he was god so… There were moments where I didn’t like him being a know-it-all, where he gets to a conclusion but doesn’t tell the team because he wants them to get to the same conclusion by themselves; example: he figured out (or at least assumed) who Roland is (because I don’t see a reason why he would want to pray) but didn’t tell anyone and look at that Mila gets drugged and almost killed because she went to the killer.

The Whisperer. Is he psychic or something, because if yes I missed that part of the book. I admit his plan was pretty damn good and I’m impressed. I’m especially intrigued by the recreation of Mila’s kidnapping. However his mysterious mysteriousness is questionable, like how couldn’t they find ANYTHING for a DNA analysis; hair, saliva, human waste I get but skin, that’s… I’m really interested how he cleaned up all of his dead skin cells.

Knowing Mila will have a girl… what kind of witchcraft was that?

Oh, I almost forgot the whisperer thing by what he got the name. He was basically getting into Goran’s head through audio and convincing him to kill his family. Hm, what?