What's a phoning-it-in psychic to do when voices from the other side demand her help in saving a life? Amanda puts her heart in jeopardy when she's told to work with Keith, a man she's always adored, in order to save Keith's brother from danger. Too bad it was the brother she dated long ago and not Keith, and too bad Keith's always turned away from the passion simmering between them. Can Keith accept who Amanda truly is, and can Amanda find the courage to embrace her psychic gifts without losing the man she loves?
It wasn't romantic or suspenseful. I felt like I was reading a story about young college kids that didn't grow up yet. It was a high school crush that continued years later. They didn't communicate or anything. Keith gets taking away by strange men with no badges and all they can think about is getting good night sleep, ridiculous.
Meg Napier does a really good job creating characters with complex backgrounds and worlds. There are consistent themes in her novels and I think she does a really good job teasing those themes out. Really good arcs for women who are constantly reinventing themselves and looking for sympathetic heroines.
I really wanted to like this book, and I did up to a point. Amanda and Keith are great characters. They were best friends in school and secretly crushed on each other. Now, they’re adults, and they haven’t seen each other in years. Not until they have to team up to find Keith’s missing brother, Peter, who was Amanda’s high school boyfriend. The opening really pulled me in, and the mystery surrounding Peter’s kidnapping kept my eyes glued to the page. Yet the constant inner monologues kept pulling me from the story. I know Amanda and Keith desperately longed for each other back in school; I don’t need to read about it in detail for the twentieth-plus time. Even as adults, they were still so insecure when it came to trusting the other’s romantic intentions, Keith especially, and I wanted to yell at them to stop being so blind. The most surprising thing to me was the big shootout with the human-trafficking scumbags. It happened off page. Sure, I get that this isn’t a romantic suspense book with a gun-toting action-hero soldier in the lead, but I still wanted Amanda, Keith, and Peter, who are just regular people, to be involved in the long-awaited climax. Beyond that, I tend to edit as I read, so I caught some punctuation errors. Overall, Second Whisper is a decent book with an engaging plot. It just needs another round of edits to be great.