Hunting Fear

Hunting Fear by Kay Hooper

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.

--Hunting Fear by Kay Hooper, Copyright © 2004 by Kay Hooper, audio copyrighted 2004 by Brilliance Audio

My Review:

Book 7 in the Bishop/Special Crime Unit series, this story starts like several others in the series, with a look at the past at how Bishop recruited another of his prized psychic agents. We then fast-forward to “present day” and dig into the story. This story’s look at the past, however, contains an important clue to the present.

Lucas Jordan and his partner arrive in Golden, North Carolina to investigate a kidnapping-turned-murder. There, he finds out the circus, or rather, the Carnival After Dark is in town, along with his former lover, Samantha Burke. A strong psychic in her own right, Sam is in Golden because of a vivid dream. In that dream, if the kidnapper/killer wasn’t stopped in Golden, he would go on for years. And Luke had to be the one to stop him.

When an author creates a series that involves the same “unusual” element—in this case, psychic abilities—that author needs to find new ways to make the story interesting. I like that Sam works in a carnival, and the repeated mentions of her lacking the “credibility” to join the SCU thanks to her work in the carnival. The gruesome methods of the killer in this story back up his audacious statement that he doesn’t kill anyone. Obviously, he does. He is responsible for the deaths of these people, but you can actually see the logic behind his illogic statement and that makes him even scarier. And, of course, what’s a good mystery without a little twist at the end?


I give this story THREE STARS.