Hunting Fear (Bishop/Special Crimes Unit Series #7) » (Reprint)

KAY HOOPER is the award-winning author of Sleeping with Fear, Stealing Shadows, and more than ten other novels of suspense and intrigue along with dozens of other books. She lives in North Carolina.

He’s no ordinary kidnapper. Not only does he strike again and again, but he collects the ransom, gets away safely, and leaves his helpless hostages dead. Now, after months of eluding the best that law enforcement can put against him, this monster has left nothing in his wake but a cold trail of unconnected victims.

He’s no ordinary cop. Lucas Jordan, a key agent and profiler in Noah Bishop’s Special Crimes Unit, has an extraordinary skill: he locates missing people. But his uncanny ability comes with a price, and his methods rouse mistrust in the hard-nosed cops forced to call him into their investigations.

Now Jordan has come to Clayton County, North Carolina, where the latest in a string of kidnapping victims has turned up dead. Complicating the situation is the presence - and predictions - of someone who’s even more of an outsider than Jordan himself: carnival psychic Samantha Burke, a woman out of his own haunted past. Her warnings meet with skepticism from the local police but spur Jordan on to do what he does best: hunt fear.

But the killer he is hunting is hunting Jordan - and he’s already several moves ahead in a twisted game whose rules Jordan must learn in order to have a fighting chance. For his psychopathic opponent has extended a very personal challenge - and he’s about to threaten the one life the profiler values even more than his own. . . .

Publishers Weekly

Hooper (Sense of Evil; Touching Evil; etc.) pits a team of psychic special agents against a diabolical serial killer in the first installment of her new Fear trilogy. Kidnapping would-be victims in Golden, N.C., the murderer sets up a torturous ending for them and then dares the lawmen to arrive in time for a last-second rescue. The primary agent assigned to stop the carnage is Lucas Jordan, who leads the investigation with a unique team of clairvoyant agents. He also gets a significant assist from Samantha Burke, a former lover who ends up on the case when she arrives in Golden working as a sideshow psychic for a traveling carnival. The initial chapters are rather boilerplate as Hooper focuses on the team's futile efforts to save local victims, but the action picks up when the murders turn personal and the kidnapper abducts a cop and then drowns her in a glass tank. His next would-be victim is Golden's sheriff. At the novel's climax, Jordan must get past his emotions to access his own psychic talent when the kidnapper turns his gaze on Samantha Burke. Hooper does a nice job of keeping the psychic material credible, and the murderer's constant shifts in methodology provide a welcome series of surprising plot twists. This is a solid entry in the annals of paranormal crime-solving. Agent, Eileen Fallon. (Aug.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.