Sunday, June 11, 2006

Touching Evil

Kay Hooper
Fiction, Mystery/Thriller

Continuing on with her exploration of psychics in law enforcement, Kay Hooper gives us the story of Maggie Barnes, a sketch artist with surprisingly accurate depictions. Seattle is being stalked by a killer who removes his victims' eyes, a quirk that just happens to throw an unexpected problem into Maggie's path. Maggie is an empath - and she can only see what her victims did.

The difficulty for Maggie is that she doesn't just see her victims' sights; she feels their pain as well. And yet she feels driven to take others' pain and continue working with the police, as if expiating some forgotten crime from long ago...

I did not feel that the resolution of this story was as complete as the one in Stealing Shadows. There's a sense of urgency to the book that does not feel fully justified by the ending; while there is conflict, and the principle characters are in real and present danger, there are a few assumptions made at the end that deflate the tension a bit prematurely.

**.5/*****

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