Touching Evil
A Bishop/Special Crimes Unit Novel
-
- $10.99
Publisher Description
Sometimes evil lingers so close, you can feel it....
Seattle police sketch artist Maggie Barnes has an extraordinary gift. She listens as traumatized crime victims describe their ordeals — and then uses those horrifying recollections to draw dead-on sketches of the assailants.
Some cops think Maggie is telepathic, that she can actually enter the victims’ minds. Only Maggie knows the truth behind her rare talent ... and she isn’t telling.
But her secret may be exposed when a madman seizes Seattle in his terrifying grip. He abducts women and blinds them, leaving them barely alive.
The police have one hope: the lone victim who might recover her sight. But they don’t know that Maggie has her own dark connection to the monster — an eerie link that may stretch back to a string of unsolved murders.
To stop the escalating terror, Maggie will have to push her abilities to the breaking point — even if it means confronting a predator whose powers seem to have no bounds....
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The first installment of Hooper's "Evil" series capitalizes on the popularity of her gothic "Shadows" thrillers (Out of the Shadows; Stealing Shadows) but will disappoint readers who are longing for more than a simple retelling of a familiar plot. When two seers, an empath and a ghost join forces to rid Seattle of a monster, two predictable things occur: the characters spend more time trying to convince skeptics of their powers than solving the case, and the heroine, Maggie Barnes, becomes one of the fiend's next targets. Maggie is a talented police sketch artist and a troubled empath. Although her ability to experience another's pain enables her to sketch an uncanny likeness of a perpetrator's face, she's unable to draw the face of a rapist who removes his victims' eyes, wears a mask and covers his natural odor with Ivory soap. Frustrated by the police's lack of progress, John Garrett, the wealthy and well-connected brother of one of the victims, recruits two FBI agents who possess special psychic abilities. The lack of communication between the police, John's team and Maggie is frustrating, and for all the novel's buildup, the final unmasking of evil is anticlimactic. A romantic interlude between Maggie and John lends the story a degree of warmth, but not enough to lift this paranormal thriller above the tepid.
