Night Whispers

Night Whispers is a romantic suspense novel by Judith McNaught, published in 1998 as the third of her Second Opportunities books.

Sloan Reynolds is a police officer with all the courage and caution her job requires, and she has no wish to meet the father who left. Carter Reynolds claims that ill health has led him to attempt a reconciliation, and he invites Sloan to Palm Beach to meet him and her half-sister Paris. She turns the invitation down, convinced that nothing good can come of it, until FBI agent Paul Richardson explains that Reynolds is under suspicion and asks her to accept after all. Sloan enters a world of gated houses and careful manners prepared to dislike everyone in it, and finds herself unexpectedly drawn to her sister, to her cranky great-grandmother and to the agent who is using her.

McNaught uses the investigation as the frame for a romance and a family story at the same time. Sloan has to work out how much of her distance from this family is principle and how much is self-protection, and the novel moves between the police work she understands and the moneyed society she does not, keeping both the case and the courtship in view.