The Whispering Room

The second book in his Jane Hawk series, Dean Koontz’s thriller novel The Whispering Room (2017)  follows Jane Hawk, an FBI agent gone rogue, as she attempts to take down an elite group of biotech executives who have harnessed the power to brainwash people to enact violence and coerce women into participating in sexual exploits. Following The Silent Corner, Jane Hawk has to avoid hacked government cameras and stay out of police custody in order to complete her mission to end this horrible conspiracy and avenge her husband's death.

When the novel opens, Jane Hawk has already lost her husband to suicide—or so others want to believe. Jane knows her husband and knows he would not kill himself, and so she spent much of The Silent Corner investigating the tech giants behind brainwashing nanotechnology that can force good people to do horrible things. Jane, who is now a former FBI agent, lost her job and is now on a US government wanted list because of her endeavors to expose this group and their scheme. But she will not give up this fight easily.

Because she has been forced to fly under the radar, Jane hides her five-year-old son away to protect him before continuing her investigation, on her own terms and using only her own tools. Jane roams the country, hiding from law enforcement officers and agents working for these tech giants while attempting to uncover and stop future brainwashing plots.



When Jane hears about a schoolteacher in Minnesota who has committed an act of domestic terrorism, she has a feeling the nanotechnology is responsible. Before her death, his woman, beloved by fellow staff and students, was forced to leave her position because she was suffering from chronic, uncontrollable migraines. The migraines led to dreams of walking through fields of fire, and finally ended in fiery chaos as the schoolteacher lit her own car on fire, got inside, and drove it through the wall of a local hotel lobby, killing more than 40 people.

A local police officer finds the schoolteacher's journal and sees evidence of the woman's extraordinary suffering, and her inability to understand or control her own thoughts. Hearing about this, Jane recognizes those symptoms for what they are—evidence of the California biotech's nanotechnology. Jane embarks on a mission to seek out the real murderers of those 42 people: the biotech company responsible for covertly injecting nanobots into the bloodstream of unsuspecting citizens.

Without her son in her care, and with the fresh grief of her husband's death weighing on her mind, Jane has nothing to lose in her renegade fight to bring justice to the victims of this plot.



Dean Koontz is an American author of more than 105 books, more than 30 of which have made it on the New York Times best-seller list. He published his first book in 1968, but his breakthrough novel, Whispers, was published in 1980. Koontz has written under several pen names, and his genres include suspense/thriller, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and horror. Born in Pennsylvania, he now lives on the southern California coast with his wife and children, and many pet dogs. Many of his novels are set in Orange County, California, where he lives.