Sense of Evil, by New York Times bestselling author Kay Hooper, is undoubtedly the best book I have read this year. While I am aware that several reviewers on Amazon gave this book low ratings, I found myself enthralled with the story and was unable to get a handle on the serial killer until he/she was revealed.

Sense of Evil is not something one expects to feel in a quiet burg like Hastings, South Carolina, but when it does a psychic special agent and a gritty cop team up to stop the perpetrator who is targeting the area’s successful blonde women. The major mystery centers on how the perpetrator is able to coax these intelligent and confident women into secluded areas to kill them. As time progresses, the perpetrator breaks from his profile and soon no women even the FBI’s top profiler, Special Agent Isabel Adams, can feel safe.

However, joining with latent psychic, Police Chief Rafe Sullivan, Isabel finds herself in an extraordinary position of sharing her needs and findings telepathically with Rafe while falling in love with him. While, discovering his own abilities, however, Rafe struggles with his fear that Isabel has been targeted by the killer and is forced to push himself to the limit to keep her from being the victim.

Hooper’s portrayal of Isabel as a smart, savvy, and confident women has the reader empathizing with her from the beginning as she enters the world of this cold-blooded monster who kills without mercy and whose very essence screams out evil. With Isabel and Rafe, providing three-dimensional characters Hooper is easily able to give us a volatile mix of romance, danger, and fast-paced action complicated further by the psychic abilities of the investigative team.

Therefore, while the story is dynamite, it is not like any of Hooper’s books in her Shadows trilogy that stood alone, as it will be a much better read for you if you read Touch and Whispers of Evil in order. That being said, Ms. Hooper is definitely one of the best thriller writers around and her book, Sense of Evil, kept me hanging (maybe because I love the psychic inclination of her tales) in such a way that I hated putting the book down until I had finished the story. However, I would again emphasize that the reader will enjoy this volume much more thoroughly if they will read the previous two books of the Evil Trilogy first.

Tags: psychic, paranormal, sense of evil, kay hooper, fiction, mystery, thriller, hastings, evil trilogy, touch, whispers of evil, rafe sullivan, isabel adams, serial killer, evil