Review: Empathy

Inventive crime/literary hybrid

Empathy

by Bryan Walpert

Mystery / Thriller

Empathy hands the reader pieces of a jigsaw puzzle page by page, but doesn’t reveal the picture you’re assembling until the novel’s final stretch. It’s an unusually inventive crime/literary hybrid, the kind of conceptual boldness that brought the short stories of Ted Chiang to my mind.

The book follows three intersecting lives across New Zealand and the United States. Alison Morris is a marketing executive trying to bottle empathy (literally) in the form of a perfume. Her husband, Jim, is developing EmPath, a game designed to teach players to understand one another without speaking. And David Geller, a widowed chemistry teacher, is drawn into the mystery when his father, Edward, disappears while working on Alison’s fragrance project.

Walpert uses these threads to explore empathy itself: its mechanics, its fragility, and its ethical limits. The novel becomes a study in Theory of Mind, the ability to infer what others think and feel — not something I’ve seen tackled in crime fiction before. Even more surprising is the collision of two industries rarely seen together in the genre: perfume and gaming. Walpert treats both with precision, showing how emotional manipulation can be engineered, marketed, and misused.

The plot unfolds with slow‑burn tension. Alison’s fragrance produces unsettling effects, Jim’s game falters, and David’s search for his father pulls him into a world where empathy becomes both currency and weapon. The tonal duality is striking: lush, interior passages sit alongside sharp, fast-paced sequences involving corporate secrecy, small-time crooks, and rising stakes.

Empathy is sophisticated, unsettling, and quietly thrilling.

^{Cuba Press}

^{Published: 2025}