Phil in SF reviewed Mr. Whisper by Andrew Mayne (The Specialists, #1)
Blandest book I've read in years
1.0 star
Content warning I semi-spoil the very end
I've read some bad books in the past few years. For instance, Trouble in Queenstown. That had a predictable plot and the stock mustache-twirling villains. But at least the characters had character.
Mr. Whisper is a half-step below that. None of the characters has any personality whatsoever. There's tons of info-dumping. Sometimes info-dumping is needed to get across important points about the setting. But in the hands of Mayne, 80% of it is irrelevant to the story. The procedural part of the investigation is a load of techno-magical hokum. Hand-wavey AI. Robot dogs that can do anything, including map underwater caves, look for heat signatures, and act independently with sophisticated onboard AI. But the bad guy's AI can be defeated by simply saying "<system>" and some garbage. The investigators are magically wealthy so Mayne can hand-wave away that they travel within hours to a half-dozen sites in the US.
The crime that's happening makes no sense whatsoever. Shadowy Mr. Whisper causes teens to do incomprehensible things. Magic happens. Profit. So many things make no sense whatsoever. So many details are inconsistent with other details. And the payoff? The bad guy flies off in a private jet from an airfield on a small island in Washington state just as the good guys close in on him. No, this isn't a setup for the next book. There's one final 3 page chapter where the villain is in a public place in a middle east emirate and the good guys appear and tell him, "we got you!"
Mayne is a semi-famous TV personality who decided to get into machine learning, then got hired as a prompt engineer/promoter for OpenAI. He promotes the hell out of AI, including several times where the text specifically lauds ChatGPT by name. On X, he angrily says he wrote every word of his books (and points to all his 5-star Amazon reviews as proof), but elsewhere loudly says he uses AI in "research" aspects of his books. I kinda believe him that he didn't have AI generate this book, because what I've seen of AI written text is way less bland than this pablum. This has the feel of some untalented self-published manuscript (I've read a few of those), which makes me wonder what, if anything, Amazon Publishing contributed to this. It has complete sentences at least, and the paragraphs are coherent. Decent line editing at least.