Whispers can tell on a person long after the shouting stops. On Anglesey in the teeth of a North Atlantic gale, the decommissioned Cold War listening station at Tŷ Melyn Array is being stripped for parts and history. The power flickers, the Menai crossings close, and Owain Pryce, a swaggering councillor with a talent for backroom deals, is found dead in the tape lab, his skull caved in with a brass hydrophone coupler. On a reel-to-reel machine nearby, a spool spools itself out, breathy voices rising and falling like tide.
Nia Griffith, twenty-nine, an audio archivist hired to digitize the station's fading tapes, is immediately suspect. She is the newcomer, the one with keys to the cabinets, the one who argued with Owain when he tried to shutter the archive in favor of a luxury hotel. Her only ally is Eirlys Morgan, eighty-one, a retired Post Office switchboard supervisor with a razor mind and a vocabulary that could strip paint. Eirlys came to reclaim a crate of tapes recorded on a winter night in 1973 and refuses to be told to wait in the canteen.
Together, Nia and Eirlys pick through humming transformer rooms and salt-crusted cable ducts, through logbooks written in clipped abbreviations and telex rolls that read like prayers. They meet a caretaker with a taxidermy habit, a meteorologist who collects barometers, a radio amateur who never left Holyhead, and a widow whose smile never reaches her eyes. The so-called whispers on the tapes are not ghosts but crosstalk and bleed, and inside that noise is a story the island has conspired to forget: a near collision in Red Wharf Bay, a trawler that listened when it should not, and a signal that never made it ashore.
As wind tears the roof sheeting and the archive floor blooms with seawater, clues click into place: a watch stopped three minutes fast, a plug of dark ash that does not match any pipe in the room, a set of footprints that begin in dry dust. Before the bridges reopen and the professionals descend, the unlikely pair must turn the murmurs into testimony, and pry the truth out of a community that would rather let the tide take it.
Under the storm noise, this mystery listens: to crosstalk, to institutional memory, to the ways a community edits itself. I loved how the book treats accountability as an act of hearing, not just speaking, and how a near miss at sea can echo for decades.
Its leitmotif is captured in a line that could headline the whole case, "whispers that tell on a person long after the shouting stops." The result is humane without being sentimental, and the final image lands with the hush of tape reaching its leader.
El paisaje de Anglesey cruje con sal y viento, y la estación Tŷ Melyn se siente como un animal viejo al que ya no le queda voz. Las cintas, los barómetros, los acoplamientos de hidrófono: todo crea una atmósfera técnica y melancólica que sostiene el misterio sin recurrir a fantasmas.
A veces el detalle minucioso ralentiza el avance, pero aporta una verosimilitud rara; cuando cierran los puentes y la luz parpadea, la isla parece un circuito cerrado que obliga a escuchar.
Nia's quiet stubbornness pairs perfectly with Eirlys's lancing wit, and their conversations ring like switched lines finding a clear path. You hear trust forming in how they trade questions, and you see how each fills the other's blind spot.
Even the side players (the caretaker with his stuffed birds, the barometer collector) arrive in crisp strokes, memorable without stealing focus from the central duet.
Hard-wired to sound, the prose hums with coil, hiss, and squall. Chapters interleave logs, telex fragments, and present-tense searches, so the mystery accrues like layers of tape rather than tidy clue packets.
A middling stretch lingers a beat too long on memorabilia of the station, yet the craft shows: the gale-driven power cuts shape the rhythm, and the small, named details (the fast watch, the odd ash, the prints born from dust) become the cleanest gears in the plot.
Wind, tape, and small-town politics knot into a taut mystery; every clue clicks like a relay until the last quiet turn.
