Simon Beckett - Whispers Of The Dead

Recuperating from a near-fatal attack, forensic anthropologist David Hunter has returned to the renowned research facility where he first trained - the Body Farm in Tennessee. Still bearing physical and emotional scars, he hopes the trip will hone his old skills and restore his shattered confidence.

So when his former mentor invites him to assist on a murder investigation, he agrees. After all, he's simply there as an observer - what could possibly go wrong?

But even Hunter is unprepared by the gruesome nature of the killing. The victim has been bound and tortured, and the body has decomposed beyond recognition - far more so than it should have. Fingerprints at the scene appear to identify the killer; however Hunter is convinced that nothing is quite as it seems.

Then a second body is found, and suddenly the team are plunged into a nightmare of deception and misdirection, in pursuit of a macabre serial killer whose forensic knowledge seems disturbingly familiar. As the death toll rises and Hunter finds he has enemies even within the investigation, he begins to fear that they might be on the trail of a maniac who simply cannot be stopped... (Description taken from author's webpage).

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Anthropologist David Hunter has come a long way since he was stabbed by Grace Strachan. With the scars that remind him from the outside, he deals with the aftermath of knowing a killer is on the loose who might or might not come back to him at any time. Separated from his girlfriend Jenny he searches for a sense in his life and if he still is any good in his job. He accepts the invitation by his old mentor Tom Lieberman, head of the unique, world famous Body Farm in Knoxville, Tennessee, to study on some dead bodies.

Tom tries to give David a way back into his old occupation and motivates him to help in a gruesome new case: a decaying body was found in a cabin, stabbed to a table, covered with maggots the scene offers a shocking picture. Despite the heat coming from a red glowing heater directly next to the dead body the maggots stages of development don't match the timeframe when the cabin was rented. The maggots seem to be much older than they should be and the only evidence leads to someone who died six month earlier.
When Tom suffers from a heart attack leaving him in intensive care, David wonders if the killer deliberately left conflicting evidence to mock the anthropologist and was planning to get to him from the beginning.
But with Tom in the hospital and the killer's plan failed, his narcissism might bring him to look for another appealing target.

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Whispers of the Dead or Leichenblaesse, the German edition I've read, is the third installment surrounding David Hunter, following The Chemistry of Death and Written in Bone
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Getting to know the author it is easily expectable that his approach to forensic studies is easily bound into the plot making it very understandable. The gruesome plot, twists and sudden developments the book is a very exciting read, as long as you don't read the German edition. I could vent for hours about the boring translation that is as far from British and American colloquial language as possible. In the end I found myself translating into English and got the tension I was waiting for.

In this third novel David Hunter seems more approachable as in the previous novels and the reader gets a more detailed sense of his personality.
For myself I could have been better off to not read the included view of the killer that made me guess the killer's identity way too early.

Overall I feel sad for the German readers. They really should consider reading the book in English. What I have found on excerpts, the book reads itself way better in its original language.
You just can't compare the dry German explanation of a decaying body with the 'colorful' explanation in English. :-)

Overall, it's the best novel in the series and I'd recommend it to anyone interested in forensics, a gruesome plot and the strength to take in one dead body after the other.

Rating:
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American Edition
Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: Delacorte Press (May 19, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0385340060
ISBN-13: 978-0385340069

German Edition
Gebundene Ausgabe: 416 Seiten
Verlag: WUNDERLICH VLG.; Auflage: 5 (16. Januar 2009)
Sprache: Deutsch
ISBN-10: 3805208669
ISBN-13: 978-3805208666