Hunting Fear

Hunting Fear Kay Hooper Date: 17 August, 2004   —   $17.50   —   DVD / VHS product page Rating:

Fiction, Mystery/Thriller

Kay Hooper has created another entry in her series about psychic detectives. As opposed to common wisdom, their psychic abilities do not make the cases any easier (the detectives have limitations, including pain and limited viewpoints), and in the case of Hunting Fear, it may actually have led to the case in question, because it quickly becomes obvious that the killer is taunting one detective, Luke Jordan, and is playing a game with him.

Luke Jordan's ability is to sense fear - the victim's fear. Unfortunately, he also experiences the fear as he does it, a trauma that has limited his potential. He has been able to track down victims before, but sometimes arrives too late. In the southern town of Golden - in a state deliberately left unspecified - a kidnapping gone south alerts the Special Cases Unit to the fact that the kidnapper may, in fact, be a serial killer, and that the kidnappings are always deliberately designed to end in death. Worse, a local carnival psychic warns that another kidnapping will take place in the town, a break in the pattern that indicates that the killer is furthering the game that they only now realize he is playing. And there's indications that the dreams of psychic Samantha told her more than she's letting on, an indication that sleepy Golden is about to blow sky-high...

As with Hooper's previous novels, there is at least one police officer who is a profound skeptic and more apt to blame the psychic than the criminal. And yes, that skeptic is always brought around. But I urge readers to pay attention to the anecdote at the beginning of the novel; as always, it is not only related to the main body of the writing, but is of critical importance to the storyline.