Whisper my name

By Roy Martin and Julie Barham

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1884824102
• ISBN13: 9781884824104
• Release Date: January 1997
• Publisher: Tryon Pub. Co
• Length: 289 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Truly a book to read all night!

Whisper My Name by Roy Martin is a book that yells "Read Me, Read Me!" Once started, it must be finished immediately. The characters become friends and acquaintances from your own past. A tale spun by a master story teller. One caution, read quietly, you don't want some of the characters to hear you breathe.

Can't wait for more!

The substance of "Whisper My Name" held me captive-I was unable to put it down until I had read the whole thing. The plot and the characters were full of intrigue and kept me guessing throughout. I cannot wait for more fiction by Roy Martin. WRITE ON, MR. MARTIN!

An absolutely wonderful first novel!

Congratulations to Roy Martin for writing an absolutely wonderful first novel. A Southern gothic romance, "Whisper My Name" has all the elements--a small town where everyone knows everyone pretty well and where secrets are kept deep and long (except that most everyone knows them). It also has a fragile, once-rich Southern belle whose mind is stolen by a husband who is mean and vicious. And there is the man who has loved her with steadfast loyalty since high school. Martin's crisp, fast-moving style sweeps the reader from the discovery of a human skeleton under the town common to the final revelation--how the bones got there. Aside from the story, which is a real gripper from page one, Martin leads the reader down several garden paths. He creates gnawing questions and then leads us to the answers only to pull the string and send us down another path. Each path is just as delightful and just as opaque in the end. Even better, we enjoy the deceptions because of his use of language. Martin flavors his novel with just the right tang of small-town North Carolina without letting it become as folksy as an Andy Griffith vignette. His figures of speech are often intriguing and place the reader right into the story, such as his take on the women who fan themselves as if they were waiting for William Jennings Bryan to return. Martin masterfully takes us from present to past so smoothly that we often move in a kind of reverie along with his main character Wiley Frost. This novel would make a terrific movie. A prediction: Martin is a first-rate storyteller who is destined to take his place with the finest Southern writers of our time.

'Whisper' Quietly Succeeds

"Whisper My Name," a novel of a Southern small town suspense and romance, is a little bit of Agatha Christie, a dash of William Faulkner, and a lot of Roy Martin, a Roanoke, Va. first novelist. Martin's fictional town of Ransom, N.C., could be Lebanon, Tenn. or Yazoo City, Miss., or Hoxie, Ark., or any place below the Mason-Dixon line that boasts a Confederate statue in the town square. Himself a product of rural North Carolina, Martin paints a panorama of Ransom that will tug at the memory synapses of anyone fortunate enough to grow up in such surroundings and will help those who didn't to a better understanding of those who did. The unlikely hero of "Whisper My Name" is Wiley Frost, the town's retired ambulance driver and mortician. As he inadvertently proves on a couple of occasions, Frost is no John Wayne. He could not fight, or shoot, his way out of a wet paper bag. Nevertheless, it is his decades-long love affair with Augusta Morefield Crawford that creates the suspense of this semi-Gothic novel, and maintains it to the turning of the last page. When workmen repairing a broken water line under the town commoon find a long-buried body, Frost knows its secret. Quickly the town learns that the body is that of the local hero, Bobby Crawford, who disappeared 40 years ago, coming home from Korea with a Silver Star and vanishing almost immediately thereafter. He left a trail of mystery, and a wife, Augusta, who returned to her family home and didn't come out the front door for 40 years. Now Bobby's body surfaces and the town--and especially an overly inquisitive reporter--want to know what happened. Almost immediately, Wiley becomes the prime suspect in the death of Crawford, though the skeleton reveals no clues as to how he died. Ransomites also suspect poor mad Augusta, assuming that her self-imposed reclusion stems from what she must have known about her husband's disappearance. As the plot and its characters rush to its conclusion, everybody is asking: What happened to Bobby? So is the reader. Like a skilled bricklayer, Martin has built a tale of suspense with the bricks and mortar of believable characters, descriptive backgrounds and a plot that never pauses for breath. It's his first novel, but certainly not his last. --John Means, a San Antonio Express-News reviewer, grew up in Lebanon, Tenn (pop. 5,000) and feels sorry for anyone who didn't.

When you reach the last paragraph you will shout, "YES!"

Nothing is what it appears in "Whisper My Name." From the get-go, when Bobby Crawford's skeleton is found in the first paragraph, there is no turning back. You will be absorbed in the suspenseful events that began 40 years earlier as they tantalizingly unfold, revealing lost love, wasted lives, and hope eternal. Did I forget to mention murder? HELL-o! Sometimes you want to smack protagonist Wiley Frost into a reality check; other times you can't help but appreciate his dogged determination, loyality, and love. Pull up a chair, turn off the phone, and get to know the folks of Ransom, N.C.!