A.N. Wilson’s crime round-up includes one of the best novels he has ever read

Karin Fossum’s series of novels in which Inspector Konrad Sejer unravels the secrets of the psychopathic or murderous heart are justly famed. The latest, The Whisperer (Harvill Secker, £12.99; Tablet price £11.69), is not just one of the best works of crime fiction I have ever read but one of the best novels I have ever read. Only slowly does the reader realise that Ragna Riegel, an assistant in a supermarket in a small Norwegian town, who can only speak in a whisper as a result of catastrophic throat surgery, is being interviewed by a police officer. The first third of the book seems like a ­narrative in which she is purely the victim. Then this perspective switches and – without spoiling it for you – there will be a third switch before you reach the last page. Psycho-thriller turns out, in the end, to be whodunnit. It is a fascinating exploration of the mentality of a paranoid schizophrenic but, such is the narrative brilliance, she is not the only one whose version of events is skewed by having to be seen and interpreted through that wonky instrument, the human brain. It is SO ­brilliant! Fossum is everything Thomas Harris is not. She really seems to know human nature.