Four elite students, four deadly secrets and a dangerous game: they can trust no one – but will they get too close to each other for their own good? – Spicy thrills and high-society vibes from this bestselling author.
WHISPERS
Die Wahrheit wird dich zerstören
(Whispers – The Truth Will Destroy You)
by Ayla Dade
Penguin, June 2024
Harvard University: instead of being conscientious, hard-working students, members of the elite fraternity Alpha Phi Omega have wild parties and set each other high-risk dares. Everyone wants to be part of the hype, and film their challenge live for the Whispers app: Noktura. But what starts as a game spins out of control when Willow, Benedict, Deepika and Jacob find Henry’s body during a team challenge at Langdell Hall. They are shocked – but relieved too: all four have a guilty secret that’s somehow linked to Henry.
Meanwhile, mysterious Noktura has her eyes and ears everywhere, and sends them an anonymous message saying that she knows that one of them is Henry’s killer. If they want her to keep quiet about their secrets they’ll have to be good kids and keep playing this pitch-black game. The four students have no other choice. As the challenges get more and more dangerous, they are driven to the brink of madness – and into each other’s arms. Are their all-consuming feelings for each other are real, or just a vile attempt to discover their secrets?
Ayla Dade spends every spare minute she has writing stories. The popular book blogger fills the pages of her New Adult novels with deep emotions and magical settings. Her readers adore her books. Her Winter Dreams series was a phenomenal success, with each instalment spending weeks in the bestseller lists, and the first book in her eagerly anticipated new Blackwell Palace series – which takes readers to the luxurious palace hotel in snowy St Moritz, a place of glamour, intrigue and a firework display of emotions – went straight to no. 3. Her latest novel, « Whispers », not only spices things up, but there’s more at stake – with risky online dares and plenty of intrigue at an elite college, as she takes her readers on a thrilling, pulse-quickening ride.
Calabria, 1960. Francesca Loftfield, a twenty-seven-year-old, starry-eyed American, arrives in the isolated mountain village of Santa Chionia tasked with opening a nursery school. There is no road, no doctor, no running water or electricity. And thanks to a recent flood that swept away the post office, there’s no mail, either.
There’s been a sensational murder at historic Castle Kinloch, a gothic fantasy of a grey granite on a remote island in the Highlands of Scotland. Literary superstar Brett Saffron Presley has been found dead–under bizarre circumstances–in the castle tower’s book-lined study. Years ago, Presley purchased the castle as a showpiece for his brand and to lure paying guests with a taste for writerly glamour. Now it seems, the castle has done him in…or, possibly, one of the castle’s guests has. Detective Chief Inspector Euan McIntosh, a local with no love for this literary American show-off (or Americans in general), finds himself with the unenviable task of extracting statements from three American lady novelists. 
A century-old trunk has been dug up near the railway village of Sterfontein. Inside is the lost journal of Victorian author ElizabethTenant – and what appear to be the remains of a child. Michael, a university student recovering from a broken heart, is intriguedby what the journal describes: a scarlet curtain billowing above the desert, covering the entrance to another world. But thingsbecome even stranger when a line in the journal seems to be connected to Michael and his cosmologist mother, written ahundred years before their time. Without much to go on, Michael travels to the old Karoo hotel where Elizabeth wrote her novelMIRAGE. Amid talk of omens in the sky, ancient prophecies and the end of the world, he tries to decipher the journal’s secrets. Asone mystery leads to the next, constellation-like patterns between his own life and Elizabeth’s appear, helped along by Renata, aself-proclaimed medium, and Oom Sarel, the local museum curator. But as time starts to dissolve in the mirages of the Karoo, itbecomes more and more difficult to know what is real and what is not. And why can’t he shake the feeling that he’s been to thevillage before?
When a young woman, Sarah Connelly, is found murdered in her home in New York’s elite Sleepy Point suburb, it triggers questions about the neighbor who discovered the body, Audrey Hughes. This kind of attention is the last thing Audrey wants. Moving to Sleepy Point was supposed to provide her with a new, quiet start after a trauma left her with incurable blindness. But the other reason she settled next door to Sarah was to spy on her. Police scrutiny moves Audrey like a pawn on a chessboard from witness to suspect, after it’s revealed that she had a volatile argument with Sarah hours before her death. The deeper the police delve into the case, the murkier the truth becomes. As the book twists and turns through alternating points of view and timelines, a compelling and complex scheme emerges that threatens all involved . . . and the ticking clock of investigation collides with the explosive secrets Audrey and Sarah have been keeping.