Clara’s Verdict
JD Kirk is best known for his Jack Logan police procedural series, which is reliable, sharply observed Scottish crime fiction. Him is something else entirely – a departure into grief, technology and the question of what we owe the dead. It works better than I expected. The premise – a widow given access to an AI replica of her deceased husband, and the secrets she uncovers as she uses it – is genuinely uncomfortable in all the right ways, and Kirk handles the ethical dimensions with more intelligence than the thriller format typically demands.
Performed by Louise Brealey, with David Tennant as the AI voice of Nick, this is a piece of audio that uses the medium with real imagination. Nick being voiced by Tennant rather than present in any physical sense is exactly the right production decision – haunting without being gimmicky.
About the Audiobook
Him runs to 9 hours and 28 minutes, published by Audible Originals in February 2025. When Sarah’s husband Nick is killed in a car accident, her world collapses. Then she discovers EternaTech – the AI programme Nick and his business partner have been secretly developing. It uses every digital trace Nick left behind: emails, texts, social media, recorded conversations. It sounds like him. It responds like him. Sarah begins to talk to it, then to rely on it, then to suspect it.
What Sarah uncovers as she digs into Nick’s final days is progressively more disturbing. Kirk manages the revelation of the novel’s secrets well – the information arrives at a pace that maintains tension without frustrating the listener – and the ethical questions around grief, consent, and the commercialisation of the dead are embedded in the story rather than debated around it. The novel’s final turn is well-prepared and emotionally satisfying, which is harder to achieve than it looks.
The dual-narrative structure – Sarah’s present-tense investigation and Nick’s past-tense perspective, delivered through the AI interface – is an effective one for audio particularly.
The Narration
Louise Brealey is superb. Her Sarah is navigating catastrophic grief while simultaneously unravelling a conspiracy, and Brealey holds both emotional registers without allowing either to overwhelm the other. She is, in the best sense, a listener’s narrator: entirely committed, completely transparent to the story.
David Tennant as the AI-Nick is inspired casting. His voice is warm and familiar in a way that carries immediate intimacy – and then, as the story develops, begins to feel slightly wrong in ways that are very effectively unsettling. The contrast between what Nick sounds like and what he may actually have been is the emotional engine of the novel, and Tennant and Brealey together make it run.
What Readers Say
Him holds a 4.1-star rating from 17 UK listeners. MrsJane gave it five stars and described it as a “superb listen,” particularly praising the Tennant-Brealey pairing and noting she “didn’t guess the end.” Suzighirl84’s five-star review captured the emotional experience: “the emotional rollercoaster pulls you in – you could feel the anguish and loss Sarah had endured.” K. J. Kelly praised the “twisty and dark AI-debate on human nature and grief” and noted it “works beautifully as an audiobook with two voices.” More critical notes came from a listener unfamiliar with Kirk’s broader work who found it “hard going” – and one who correctly observed that the AI premise requires some suspension of disbelief. Both fair points.
Who Should Listen?
Listeners who enjoy psychological thrillers with genuine emotional weight – fans of Lisa Jewell’s domestic suspense or Sarah A. Denzil’s grief-inflected crime fiction will find this a close fit. Anyone interested in the ethics of AI and digital grief will find the ideas here handled with more care than the thriller label might suggest. Essential for David Tennant’s audio fanbase, of whom there are, as he would be the first to acknowledge, rather a lot.
Listen to Him on Audible UK – and ask yourself how well you really know the voice of someone you love.
