Review: The Last Whisper in the Dark

The Last Whisper in the Dark by Tom Piccirilli
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A few months after his brother's execution, the man who married the love of Terrier Rand's life goes missing and Terry starts sniffing around. Meanwhile, Terry's mother's family reaches out to her for the first time in decades to tell her that her father is dying and Old Crowe might just have a job for Terry...

The Last Kind Words was phenonmenal and the goal for 2018 is to read as much Tom Piccirilli is possible. I broke through my ebook cheapness ceiling and grabbed this one post haste. I knew it was going to be good when I was threatening to shed tears after the first few pages.

The Last Whisper in the Dark picks up months after the events of The Last Kind Words. Terrier is watching Kimmi and Scooter, Chub's family that could have been his, when Chub goes missing after a botched bank robbery. The other thorns in his side are Danny Thompson, local mob boss, and Perry Crowe, Terry's estranged grandfather.

Much like The Last Kind Words, The Last Whisper in the Dark is all about family secrets and lies. Terry is hiding things from everyone, especially himself. His mother's family proves that not all the illegal inklings come from the Rand side.

There's a lot more going on in this one than Terrier Rand's previous outing. While I could see where some of it was heading, some of it still caught me off guard. I love that Terry showed some integrity and didn't immediately try to worm his way into Kimmi's life. He did some dumb things, though, things that I think would have come back on him had Tom Piccirilli lived long enough to write future volumes.

While I love the crime elements, my favorite parts of the book are the moments Terry shares with his mother, Wes, and even Endicott. The supporting cast was very rich, even after only two books.
The Rands are much more complex characters than they could have been. Terrier's father dealing with the onset of Altzheimer's was very sad and one of the many elements that sets this above 99% of crime books out there.

I only had a couple gripes with this. I thought the ending came out of left field and was a bigger logical leap than Terrier ought to have been able to make. The other gripe was the way Darla could have been a richer character but wound up pretty much being someone for Terry to bang.
The entirety of my reading experience was tinged with regret that Tom Piccirilli was dead. The Rand family had enough skeletons in the closet to fuel any number of future books.

The Last Whisper in the Dark is a great entry in the Terrier Rand saga. I just wish it wasn't the end. Four out of five stars.

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