The Whispering - L.A. Detwiler
THE WHISPERING
L.A. DETWILER
****
When the walls start to talk, the façade of Cadie’s perfect life—including the man who swore to protect her—begins to crumble in this tense psychological thriller.
Cadie McIntyre thinks Wright Manor will heal her. Perched above the dark New England coastline, her fiancé’s ancestral estate is grand, remote, and nothing like the chaos she’s fled. And Oliver Wright, the brilliant doctor who saved her life once, has vowed to keep her safe forever.
But the longer Cadie spends behind its locked doors, the more the house seems to breathe around her. Hallways shift, shadows linger, and whispers curl through the walls, warning her of family secrets buried for generations. And soon, her betrothed’s tender concern starts to look a whole lot like control.
As Cadie’s world narrows to the manor’s suffocating rooms, she must decide whether Oliver is her savior or her captor. Because someone—or something—in this place wants her quiet, compliant, and very much alone.
From USA Today–bestselling author L.A. Detwiler comes this chilling suspense novel inspired by The Yellow Wallpaper and set in a home built on secrets, in which the truth isn’t just unsettling . . . it’s deadly.
MY REVIEW
****
It’s spooky season at Kindig Blog and I am loving the quality of horror on offer in 2026! A thriller set in a mysterious manor with a haunting past drew me in and I was excited to read more.
Cadie is ready for a fresh start, so she moves to Wright Manor, her fiancé’s family estate to take time to heal and recover with her husband to be, Oliver. However, when the walls begin to whisper and Cadie sees unexplainable things, she starts to wonder who she can trust…
The Whispering is a beautifully written and sinister psychological thriller which had me hooked from the outset. It’s relatively short, but I feel it was well paced and the horror elements that are included are enough to keep the reader on edge, unsure what is actually happening or if there’s an element of the unreliable narrator at play. I wish perhaps that we had a little more of the ‘normal’ dynamic between Oliver and Cadie at the start, before it descends into darkness. I think this would have made it a little more twisty as the outcome is a little obvious throughout. I still enjoyed reading it to find out what would happen next though!
The book itself is based on the 1892 short story of The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which I haven’t read. A scan of the blurb shows the similarities though and I think if you enjoyed this book and wanted to read a modern spin on it, this would be a good match for you. I liked the undercurrent of female rage throughout - there are some chapters which flashback to the Salem Witch Trials in the town which add to this theme. I enjoyed the ending, but I do think it dragged on a little bit as it tried to wrap things up from lots of different perspectives. I think it would have been a stronger ending to finish on the button of Cadie’s story, rather than the newspaper reports, flashback to the trials and then a bonus chapter from Oliver’s perspective. I felt this particularly as Oliver’s chapter didn’t really introduce a twist or a new element to the story - it just solidified a motive we already knew about.
Overall, The Whispering is a beautifully written psychological thriller with a supernatural twist – a great gothic read for this Halloween season. Thank you to NetGalley & Podium Entertainment for the chance to read the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
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