Summary
This is ... not good.
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Narrator
8.18.2025
Going Downhill and Gross
Chapters 10 thru 14
While it seems like the platonic aspects of Tilda and Hadrian’s relationship are continuing nicely, I am finding something both disturbing and typical when it comes to how men view women in relationships like this. It speaks to the ongoing issue I have with this category of “romance” novels that are actually more creepy, problematic, and offensive than romantic (i.e. falling in love with a witch killing Nazi). Not so surprisingly, it’s mostly women writers who create these stories.
During Tilda’s chapters you understand that Tilda is very focused on her career as an investigator. She values this more than romance, seeks a career more than she seeks marriage (in fact she seems pretty uninterested in the institution at all), and takes everything she does very seriously. She is very no-nonsense when it comes to how she wants to live her life. She sees all the problems that arise when women don’t have control of their own lives and money, for example, and has taken it upon herself to wrest control from the the corrupt male relatives that have been gambling or embezzling funds away from the women in their families. She is not someone who spends her time thinking about or fantasizing about men. She is incredibly sensitive and empathetic and, in fact, spends more time worrying about Hadrian’s health and the toll his psychic powers take on him than anything else. She’s all business.
In Hadrian’s chapters ALL he does is think about how different Tilda is from other women, her financial status, what kind of outdated clothes she is always wearing and how he can help her financially because he is a royal. In fact, he seems to get off on the idea of being able to take care of her in this way and provide a salary for her when it’s obvious she wants to work and earn her own money. However, at the same time he’s thinking about how “amazing” and “independent” and “smart” she is, he is also jealous when she “pretends to flirt” with other men when she is roleplaying for investigation purposes and he also thinks about how he wants to touch her with his bare hands (he wears gloves to keep his psychic gift from picking up things). Hadrian was engaged to a woman before and it turns out she was sleeping with another man even during the engagement. He broke it off with her and ever since he’s been not interested in getting married again but he spends a lot of time thinking about Tilda in ways that are unprofessional. As much as he seems very into the fact that she’s unlike any woman he’s ever met – smart, uninterested in romance and marriage, career focused, confident, and capable – he also treats her mentally in his mind just like any other woman by constantly wanting her for himself.
It would be easy to say that Hadrian is a more progressive man in this era but he’s not. None of the men in the story treat Tilda as anything other than what she presents … a private investigator. No man has told her to go home and get married, no man has seemed even surprised that she is doing this kind of work. She is respected by the men that do know what she does and is encouraged by them. There aren’t situations in the book where she is being disrespected or put down by men for working or for being independent so it’s not like Hadrian employing her and working with her is somehow unique to him. His admiration for her easily shifts into a desire to be with her constantly and it’s fetishy and gross. It’s not professional and borders on obsessive.
What makes it worse is that Tilda doesn’t see herself as an object of desire … perhaps because she is “poor” or perhaps because she is more focused on having a career for herself and not on marriage. So, what happens is we have Hadrian constantly saying things like “you have a wonderful smile”, “I love your laugh”, “Your eyes sparkle when you get an idea in your head” and stuff like that in order to flatter her and continuously reinforce his lack of professionalism … as if he’s the one who is going to be responsible for Tilda seeing herself as ” a woman” through his eyes instead of “an investigator”.
Why do women write things like this? Is this really romantic for them? This idea that some guy is necessary to pull women out of their own ideas as independent and into being more an object for some guy? Hadrian says Tilda is unlike any woman he’s ever known and she is absolutely more dominant than him and more in control at all times. In fact, she is constantly telling him to keep his mouth shut and let her do the talking during investigations because he sucks at it and keeps causing problems. He’s not a superior to her and he knows that and says it constantly and he seems to, again, be excited by the fact that she’s “in charge” and that she “knows what she’s doing” and is “a fully capable investigator” and I think that only makes him desire her sexually even more.
Tilda’s chapters do not contain ANY thoughts like that from her AT ALL about him. She is not thinking of him in any way beyond professional. She is not desiring him. She is not lusting after him. She is not doing anything except the job she wants to do. She is not doing anything except telling him to shutup and stop screwing things up. She is not doing anything except being understanding of him and his abilities and wanting to help him solve this mystery. She’s not sitting in the carriage wanting to touch him or thinking about his laugh or his smile or anything like that. I don’t think she cares AT ALL about any of that stuff. But here’s my worry … she’s going to start to and the entire story is going to go downhill from there.
Why write books about “strong, independent women” just to have them be manipulated and desired by men who only see them as some fetishy dominant? Why can’t Tilda just be exactly what she wants to be? Why does Hadrian have to be the one to “show her how beautiful she truly is” or “convince her how desirable she is”? What is the point? Is the point to say Tilda is a modern woman at the turn of the century who can work AND get the guy? She doesn’t want the guy. She doesn’t need the guy. She wants to have a career that has nothing to do with getting favors from men or needing men to take care of her and her grandmother. She wants to do that HERSELF. Why write about a woman who wants all those things and then every other chapter have us subjected to the internal thoughts of some guy who only sees her as a woman that he desperately wants to “have” for himself?
I love Tilda’s chapters because they are about HER and her work, her ingenuity, her brilliance, her curiosity and her skills as an investigator. Tilda’s chapters are all about how much she cares for those around her and cares about their well-being and how she wants to help and protect them – including Hadrian. In contrast, Hadrian’s chapters are also all about HER … in all the wrong kinds of ways and in the last chapter he was literally jealous when she pretended to flirt with a bartender to get information about the suspect they are trying to catch. She was playing a role … she was undercover … and all she did was smile at him. Hadrian’s mind was filled with thoughts about how she smiles, how she doesn’t smile at him that way, and why doesn’t she smile at him that way … and how he was jealous. What the fuck are you jealous of? What is wrong with you? What does any of this have to do with the case? Why can’t you focus on what is actually important like Tilda does?
Men can never be in platonic relationships with women … they only ever see them as objects to obtain for themselves and that is obvious in every chapter that is told from Hadrian’s perspective. Every time he gives her a compliment it’s obvious the goal is to flatter her and have her for himself. It’s akin to: “you know you’re beautiful right?”, “don’t you know how amazing you truly are?”, “I love your smile, you should smile more.”
It’s gross AF.
8.17.2025
New Author, New Narrators (Kinda)
Chapters 1 thru 9
If you have read my other reacts and experiences you know that I’m generally not a fan of any male narrators except for Angus King, Richard Armitage, and occasionally Will Damron. Men’s voices tend to be grating and annoying and triggering for me and since I listen to audiobooks to relax, I don’t want a male voice drifting through my ears and subconscious at bedtime.
Angus, Richard, and Will have really pleasant voices that I don’t mind listening to and they always bring such a great vibe to the books they narrate. It is because I don’t normally enjoy male voices that I almost never choose a book where one of the narrators is a woman I like and the other is some unknown male. As soon as the male voice enters the narration I am often turned off completely. Such was the case with Between, which I absolutely LOVED in the beginning, and then had to give up without finishing.
I was already familiar with the work of Raphael Corkhill as an actor though. I have seen him in many shows before. Raphael is one of those character actors who will show up on something for 1 or 2 episodes but you never forget him because he’s so distinct looking and usually plays amazing characters that eat the scenery in such epic ways. I loved his work in NCIS: Hawaii, All Rise, and Mrs. Davis. I am also familiar with a lot of his voicework in videogames. So he’s not entirely new to me, but this is my first time hearing him as a book narrator.
He is someone who I will have to soon move to my “acceptable” male narrators list.
I have two other books in my Audible library that are read by Tamsin Kennard: The Next Girl: Detective Gina Harte, Book 1 and Fallible Justice: Wilde Investigations, Book 1. I knew I had recognized her name but I wasn’t sure why until I started writing this review. Neither of those books I have started yet, but I’m glad to know that I have more of her work to look forward to getting to experience.
I don’t know if Tamsin and Raphael worked together on this process of narrating or whether they just both did things separately. I mention this because the way Raphael voices and characterizes Tilda when he reads his chapters is very different from how Tamsin voices and characterizes her. Tamsin’s Tilda is very confident, self directed, inquisitive, and funny. Tilda, from the perspective of Hadrian Becket, is almost defensively independent, overly professional, guarded, and an object of slightly fetishy attraction. This could be how the book is intentionally written. When you have two different characters giving their perspectives of the same event or each other, you are going to get views that are unique to each of them. This also comes across in the voicework. When Tamsin is voicing Hadrian’s character he is almost an entirely different feeling character than when Raphael is voicing him.
When I was reading a series of detective novels – I can’t remember the name right now, but I think Jack Logan – there was a situation where there was a spinoff series and some of the characters often appeared in different books. The spinoff series and the original series were read by different people so when characters from the original series “guest appear” in the spinoff I did kind of expect them to sound different because one series is read by a man and the other series is read by a woman. However, in an effort to keep continuity, and because the characters are SO distinct and unique, it is clear that both narrators are familiar with each others work and made efforts to keep the voices as similar as possible to each other’s across the series. I appreciated that. I appreciated that there was a clear vision of each character and the narrators weren’t just deciding how they wanted to play that character in their narration and making it however they wanted. It was obvious that either a discussion was had or they were at least familiar with the original character and kept theirs as close as possible.
In A Whisper of Death it feels like Tamsin and Raphael were hired to read alternate chapters in this book and there was no discussion about it. I’m not saying I expect Tamsin to lower her voice to a vampy, whispery gothic male … that wouldn’t work for her, but the two versions of Hadrian are so drastically different, at first I didn’t realize that it was the same character Tilda was dealing with in her chapters. He comes across, in her chapters, WAY different and almost like an entirely different man. Hadrian’s Tilda is annoying to me and comes across much how I think independent and confident women seem to most men. Tilda’s Harbin is also very soft and bothersome and kind of annoying too and doesn’t strike me as the kind of person he actually is from his own perspective.
It reminded me of something I loved about The Affair TV series with Dominic West and Ruth Wilson. It was PURPOSELY designed to give you drastically different versions of the characters from the other character’s perspectives and I loved that because you never know whose version was the “real” version or if there even was such a thing. How Ruth Wilson saw herself in flashbacks was very different than how Dominic West saw her etc. It was a brilliant mechanic to show how perspective and recollection can shape relationships.
I don’t think what is happening with A Whisper of Death is some intentional mechanic like with The Affair. I think it’s two people who were hired to narrate a book who have no idea what the other person is doing and who each have their own interpretations of the characters they are voicing. I find it distracting especially since it changes how the characters come across and behave depending on whose perspective the chapter is from and, subsequently, who is voicing them. It’s something people who read dual narrators probably are familiar with but this is new for me and I can’t say it would make me want to read more books like this especially if they are first person, alternating narrative books like A Whisper of Death.
All that said … I really am enjoying this book.
The first 9 chapters kept me awake and completely riveted to the story. When I look at my watch it was 3am and I had to turn the book off and switch to Cavendish and Walker. Though, you’ll notice from the sleep chart that as soon as I switched books I fell asleep. This is not not to say that Cavendish and Walker books aren’t good or interesting, but they are very predictable and don’t require a ton of concentration.
I have been reading a lot of these historical, Victorian adventure/romance/mystery books this year and I really love the setting a lot. It comes down to the characters and I do very much like Tilda and Hadrian and I am very interested in how their relationship as partners is developing. I’m really not interested in them becoming romantically involved and I wish books would stop forcing every male and female partnership to be romantic. I dislike it in television too. Bones is a perfect example. I don’t know what is so wrong with people working together AS PARTNERS who love each other and respect each other but who don’t have to be an item.
Where are the platonic partner books? If anyone knows of good ones with good narrators please let me know; partners like Cavendish and Walker, Jackman and Evans, Sherlock and Watson, Kim Stone and her ENTIRE epic team … to be honest those are the only ones I can think of. Not everything has to be, or should be, about sex and I just wish more books focused on characters and adventure and less on romantics.
Right now I am loving Tilda and Hadrian. They are a wonderful investigative team and I love how they are working together to solve multiple mysteries. Something I also like about A Whisper Of Death is it’s the guy who has the parapsychological skillset, not the woman. Hadrian is psychoscopic and can get visions from objects or people he touches. He has no idea how or why he has this skill and him learning to manage it as well as figure out if he can trust Tilda with his secret without being committed to an insane asylum is great drama.
Story this session: 5.0 out of 5.0 stars
Narration: 5.0 out of 5.0 stars
