REVIEW: Blood Dreams by Kay Hooper
Dear Ms. Hooper:
This is the 10th entry in the Special Crimes Unit led by FBI Special Agent Noah Bishop. For the uninitiated, Bishop is an individual with a great psychic gift who has made a career of collecting other gifted people to join the fight against crime and evil perpetrating crime. There is a not quite competing, not quite cooperating civilian organization that does some of the same things for private citizens called Haven. Dani Justice and her sister, Paris, are employees of Haven
Dani Justice is a dream walker who essentially sees visions of the future in her dreams. She can bring others into her dreams to walk them with her. Her twin sister, Paris, also has a psychic skill which ultimately led her husband to divorce her. Paris lives in their hometown, Ventura, and Dani returns to be supportive. Dani also returns because she has been having the same dream over and over and it involves the terrible killings of young women by a serial killer. The serial killer dreams of his acts and that is how Dani is ultimately the tool that is needed to stop him. Her dreams also involve Bishop and a tragic ending. Dani and Paris ultimately work with Bishop to attempt to put an end to the serial killer but Dani believe that the end will come at a price too dear for some involved.
I’ve read a few in the series so I don’t know if can fairly say whether a newcomer could enter the series and not be confused. There are a lot of individuals in this book and, at times, I felt confused about who was whom and how they related to each other or the SCU.
There is a decent but understated romance between Dani and Marcus Purcell, the Ventura Sheriff. They were lovers in Dani’s youth but she left him behind in Ventura believing that she could not ask him to leave a place in which he was so firmly rooted and because she feared what come of their relationship given her psychic abilities. I didn’t fully understand Dani’s reason for leaving Marcus, particularly in light of Marcus’ implacable acceptance of her gift. I was sold on their relationship but thought that Dani and Paris’ connection was the more meaningful or, at least, the more fully fleshed out one.
The best part of the story is the suspense. The serial killer was super creepy (and for readers who have a low tolerance for violence, this book is not for them). Dani was so convinced something terrible was going to happen and that sense of foreboding was well conveyed to the reader. Dani’s dream vision is told more than once and I never found it to be repetitive which is something I feared. The ending was a surprise and didn’t cheat Dani’s visions.
Because of the confusion of characters, the mild romance, but the good suspense, I think this is a B- book. Some people might find the ending too open but given that it was a trilogy and there was some resolution, I was satisfied.
Best regards,
Jane
This book can be purchased in hardcover or ebook format.
No lapses in logic? I’m shocked. In the first few books she was far better with the romance than the suspence, then she seemed to go off the romance and get no better at concocting a suspense plot.
Anyone who hasn’t read the earlier books there is a spoiler below, you’ve been warned.
I gave up on her after suffering through things such as she had someone look at a box of skeletal remains and come up with age and [i]weight[/i]. Then there was the one where a person disappeared from one location and reappeared in a cabin some distance away and this crack law enforcement team never searched the structure of a pretty small cabin for anything like oh, some evidence of who took the person there which might have lead to the discover of a tunnel that lead back to the first location.
There may have been, after all, I don’t find her doing a lot of forensic work in solving the crime since much of it relies on psychic ability so I might be giving her a pass on things or not placing close enough attention.
Maybe I’m just tired of Bishop’s all-knowing, all-seeing shtick, but I didn’t like this one. I DID think the dream sequences were repetitive (I kept wondering why they kept having to ask her where the freakin’ stairs were if she’d told everyone about the dream in detail every time she had it) and the rest of the story moved at a snail’s pace. There’s no way to get any clue about who the villain is, and I was hugely annoyed by the ending. I’m usually a pretty big Hooper fan, and I’d been waiting for this one, but I’d give it a C- at best.