When a woman’s brother is murdered, she is taken in by a man who shows her that she has special gifts that can identify killers, and a world of them trying to kill her for it.

There was a lot to like about this book, but the way it’s written is depressing and repetitive, dragging the story to a halt. I’d forgotten how the more recent Goodkind storytelling latches onto a concept and beats it to death, repeating it over and over. Why do we need six chapters explaining how Kate can see that people are killers by looking in their eyes? Even at the electronics store, when they are trying to be inconspicuous, they spend several chapters discussing the dark web. The length of time they spent pretending to test out a computer was suspicious in itself. The parts of the book I liked most were Kate’s training, how to be ruthless in defense of herself, given the premise that she was being hunted. The book is touted as a thriller, but it’s mostly just depressing, giving the worst facets of humanity, despite Kate’s weak arguments to the contrary. Jack, on the other hand, was an exact duplicate of Richard Rahl from Sword of Truth, describing evil with the exact same intensity, repeating the same thing twenty different ways so that the female character (Kahlan or in this case Kate) understands. Certainly, the western world is trying to ignore or forget about the atrocities outside our little domains, and I liked the concept of cycles of light and darkness, though I think the period is much shorter than what he describes here. It makes a person think, based on the biased and compelling evidence presented in this book, but I like to think of progress instead. I just wish the writing wasn’t so repetitive and black and white when it comes to truth and fatiguing when describing evil (just like in the Sword of Truth).

I honestly can’t decide if this is more fantasy, due to the magical ability to recognize killers, or science fiction, due to the urban setting and the almost telepathic nature of what Kate can do. It doesn’t really matter, because the book is not supposed to be either, marketed as a thriller, which doesn’t fit in my categorization scheme.

Kate meets the detective AJ at the scene of her brother’s murder. Mentally challenged (though this book doesn’t mince words about him being handicapped or mentally deficient), John had been helping AJ identify killers by looking at photographs of suspects. It turns out that Kate has the same ability, though it takes six or seven chapters of explaining to get to that point –the author passing back and forth across the point many times in each chapter. I don’t have a problem with Kate not believing it, just the way that AJ keeps presenting arguments that are pretty much the same and hammering the point home so much.

This was true of many Sword of Truth novels, which I often got tired of because of that, though in that case, I liked the characters due to the previous novels. Here, I don’t know the characters. Unfortunately, the style doesn’t let up through the entire book, probably on purpose. Fortunately, there are some real gems buried underneath all of that repetition.

AJ invites Kate to her house for supper, after which they retire to look at photographs, and Kate singles out not just a killer, but somebody who she “knows” has raped and killed a young girl. As with the New World Army in the Sword of Truth books, the author takes the worst of humanity and puts it on display, without holding back or trying to be polite. He uses evil, rape, and the most ruthless descriptions possible many times. As with Kahlan in those books, he allows some bad things to happen to Kate, but never the worst of what has occurred to others.

The author must have done a huge amount of research for this book, into all the bad things that can happen to people, and all of the dark roads that can be taken on the internet and dark web (here called the darknet). I hope for the sake of the world that he had grossly exaggerated what can be done and what is being done. But based on the news and things that are happening these days, his theories for Evil and the cyclic nature of good vs bad seems all too plausible. It’s a real nightmare in that sense.

When the author of a book AJ recommended, which describes abilities such as hers, Jack, shows up at her office, she falls instantly head-over heels in love, though she wouldn’t call it that. She’s interested in his eyes, but he is very charismatic, and she recognizes that he is a killer, but not a danger to her. The first real shock of the book comes when she announces that she’s going to bring Jack over to AJ’s for supper, and they arrive to find AJ and her husband and son butchered and violated in the living room. Kate’s nature ensures she gets help, though they are beyond help. Jack’s nature is to get away as fast as possible. They complement each other by meeting somewhere in the middle, though far closer to Jack’s side.

Jack puts Kate in danger by letting her get the car on her own, which was obviously baiting a trap, as the killer follows her, chasing her away from the house and through a neighborhood. When forced to confront the killer, Kate uses her self-defense techniques well, but ultimately has less stamina and strength than the killer, who also produces a knife. That’s when Jack steps in. His reasoning is that he’s seen too many people who want help, but don’t want to help themselves. He sees that Kate will use her last bundle of energy to defend herself, something he agrees with.

Jack is not forthcoming about his past but Kate has resources of her own. She knows that he used to work for the Israeli secret service, which is another ruthless gang, to find people like her, to reduce terrorism. He’s right that we give killers too much leeway and police too many rules, and like Kate, I think we’ve evolved to the point where it’s nice to second-guess what we are doing to ensure we don’t make mistakes. But in the world Jack describes (and based on the Sword of Truth, I’m inclined to think this is the author’s belief as well), evil is cropping up all around, and truth is failing. It seems even more likely now than when this book was written, with dictators taking over democracies, and terror gangs taking over countries, including those we consider civilized. The author doesn’t back down from putting all of the worst qualities together into a cohesive conspiracy theory. Again, it’s frightening, which is why this book is labeled a thriller, and I hope he’s exaggerating what can be done by the bad guys, and undervaluing the counter-terror agencies.

It’s interesting that Kate’s brother John’s killer is caught and killed himself around the halfway point of the book –not what I was expecting. But the rest follows Kate’s quest to become more self-sufficient and enact vengeance, which was ultimately more interesting. Once we got away from John’s preaching and all his examples, which turned him into an almost exact clone of Richard Rahl from the Sword of Truth, there was some good action and suspense. In their hotel room, Jack teaches Kate more aggressive self-defence, and offence to go with it, including hidden knives. While he spends too much time decrying airport security and why Jack wants to put their knives in checked baggage instead of carry-on, it leads to a good scene where Kate finds a bomber, who prematurely detonates in an empty airplane.

I liked the self-defence training and the way Jack explains that to save her life, she will likely need to kill others.

The core concept of the book is that there are killers and normal people, and then there are rarer people like Kate and her brother John, who can identify killers by looking into their eyes. Evolution balanced that with people who could identify people like Kate. And now there is Kate, who can even identify the methods killers have used or will use. It’s a concept that is as intriguing as other SF and fantasy thrillers I’ve read, especially considering the proposed millennia timescale. Unfortunately, Jack takes forever to explain it, and repeats it many times throughout the book.

While Jack holds a sense of urgency through the book, the author does the opposite. He pauses the most urgent parts of the book to have Jack explain things in repetitive detail so that Kate and the readers understand. It’s hard to miss the point in this book. One scene is particular exemplifies this point –the electronics store. Eager to avoid being tracked by people on the dark web, since Kate’s computer is a corporate asset used in defence contracts and dark web access could be tracked through that, Jack takes them to an electronics store. There, he spends several chapters looking suspicious, covering his screen from passers-by, talking low, and apparently just surfing the internet. Is this normal in an electronics store? Can people spend what seems like hours surfing the internet, looking up anything, without being bothered by the admittedly haggard staff? Regardless, Jack reboots the machine off his portable drive, which allows him to surf the dark web untraceably. There, he shows Kate how much information exists about so-called secret stuff, including a web site dedicated to tracking down people like Kate. It has pictures of her brother, and videos of a woman Jack had met in New York who was brutally tortured, raped and killed, with every step posted online. In the next scene, they use Kate's laptop to check something on the dark web.

Jack’s story about the woman was surprisingly tender, until she disappears and he finds her videos online.

I predicted the ultimate culprit behind the website and plot to destroy people like Kate fairly early on, knowing that Jack’s editor was the gateway to reaching him, though the author makes a good try to make it seem like she just keeps crazy people away from him. It’s interesting that while Kate and Jack are prepared for an attack through most of the story, including the tension-filled but ultimately uneventful funeral for her brother, it’s the moment they feel safe when they become vulnerable. Finally going to New York, they are put up in a fancy hotel with order-in supper by the editor, during which time they are drugged and taken to separate buildings for torture.

Kate manipulates her attacker, and uses newly-found martial arts techniques that she just observed Jack do earlier in the book –I don’t think she even practiced them once- to escape. She kills him, and finds her way out of the building, calls Jack’s contact in the Israeli intelligence, who of course has agents nearby. She’s picked up by one of them moments after she escapes, and they find rundown buildings belonging to the rich editor. It all happened a little too conveniently, but the story was running long, so I didn’t mind. Kate finds Jack in one of the buildings, but they obviously know she’s coming because there’s nobody around, and Jack is hanging by a rope, bleeding profusely. When it’s clear that they won’t kill Kate, and that they might lose their lives also, they kill Jack, hanging helplessly.

Kate’s inability to save Jack was important to her development, the final piece, as she admits she loves him, and he reciprocates, probably the first time in a very long time, right before he dies. Kate will move on, and probably continue Jack’s work, maybe finding others like her. It’s unfortunate that the author decided to keep him alive secretly in a coma in the last few pages, which cheapens Kate’s lesson.

There were several apparent inconsistencies through the book, which I read several times to try and figure it out, but unable to, I moved on, and they didn’t harm the story, and I may have read them wrong. One was Jack’s distinction between him being able to find people like her, the way the hunter-killers can, but he can’t see it the way they can. So what kind of hunter is he? I really thought he was just like the hunter-killers, except on the side of good instead of evil, but it doesn’t seem right.

Regardless, there were some neat concepts in this story, but they were put together with too much intensity of repetition. Remove that, and the book could have been half as long. Remove the hyper-focus on Evil, and it wouldn’t have been a thriller, but it would have been more of a reasonable assessment, hopefully. In any event, I grew tired of being bombarded by Jack’s talk about evil and the way he brushed off Kate’s weak counter-arguments. Still, I can see how thriller fans could get the creeps from what the author had to say.