2/5 STARS - the very best I can do!OK ... this is one of those books where I wonder if I read the same story as everyone else. According to the Goodreads statisticians, Hunting Fear has just over 6,000 ratings for an average rating of 4.2/5.0. WOW! I felt very generous by awarding it 2/5 STARS. What up? What planet am I on? What am I missing? Are those 6,000+ folks reading a different version? I don't know. I'm dazed and confused!I apologize to the many Kay Hooper fans out there but ... a team of psychic federal agents? Seriously? This simply did not work for me at all!The story core is pretty straight forward. Lucas Jordan, a gifted psychic working solo as a private investigator on missing person and abductions cases, was recruited five years ago by FBI Special Agent Noah Bishop into the Bureau's very new but purposely covert Special Crimes Unit of psychic agents. In order to secure funding for a newly minted psychic unit and mute public scrutiny and skepticism, Bishop keeps the unit and its activities under the radar.For the past 18 months Jordan has been chasing a serial kidnapper around the country, always one step behind the perpetrator, unable to leverage his psychic abilities to collect any solid leads. What's uniquely maddening about this case is even after the kidnapper receives ransom payments for the victim’s release, the victims are murdered. And the murders are executed in very bizarre ways, using remotely timed contraptions that behead, drown, exsanguinate or asphyxiate.In steps Samantha Burke, aka Zarina, a genuine, gifted psychic with Carnival After Dark, which happens to be playing Golden, NC where the latest kidnap/murder event has occurred. Samantha and Lucas were in a broken relationship three years prior so they are very familiar with each other’s talents, personalities, and paranormal styles. Working with other agents within the SCU and the local sheriff's department, Sam and Lucas pit their skills and expertise against a serial killer who treats each gruesome murder as just another move in a grand chess game against Lucas.This thing went off the rails for me as soon as I knew psychics were involved and crashed and burned when Zarina, the carnival act and former lover of the head of the Golden, NC investigation, makes her appearance. Not that I don’t consider the possibility of psychic phenomenon, clairvoyance, extrasensory perception and parapsychology. You never know right?What I struggled with was the superficial, almost mundane, matter of fact treatment of the crimes, the victims and even the killer. I felt zero emotional relationships with anyone in the story. Is there such a genre as crime mystery-lite? Disturbing acts of violence like slow drowning, premature burial, ingenious devices of self-inflicted exsanguination, where victims endure the pure terror by knowing their eventual fate and unable to do anything but hope for rescue, received no special exploration at all, just another piece of the puzzle.Do you remember the Batman series of the 1960s? For folks less than 30 years of age, this was a prime time TV series where the dynamic duo chased varied and assorted criminals (Joker, Riddler, Penguin, Cat Woman, to name a few) in Gotham City. Each episode ended in a cliffhanger where Batman or Robin or both were left in some moral danger, often times within some strange and unusual death machine, which resolved itself the following week. Google it for details.Anyway, images of Burt Ward and Adam West popped into my head as I read this book. Weird or what???So Samantha Burke aka Zarina makes the scene ...Sam and Lucas team up and strategize ......as new victims are drugged, kidnapped and set up in bizarre instruments of psychological torture and deathBy book's end, the good guys prevail, the case is solved and it's time to move onto another adventure.So, you ask, why did I read this book? Darn library book sale that’s why! At my library's 2014 annual Spring Book Sale http://www.westath.org I purchased this book on the third day of the sale, Saturday, when everything was 4/$1. Yup for a mere $0.25 I decided to try Kay Hooper. With all due respect to Kay and her loyal readers, once is enough. I’m moving on. Good bye Ms. Hooper
I am always looking forward to start a new Hooper book. Even if they they don't make my top reads list they are usually fast paced and intriguing and they make for enjoyable reads. Hunting Fear is no exception and almost made it to the above mentioned list.Lucas Jordan is another of Bishop's agents. The book starts with Bishop enlisting Jordan which was a really nice bit as I don't think we've been getting enough Bishop in the last books I've read. As the other agents on the team Lucas has a particular psychic ability - he can sense fear. He has been chasing a kidnapper who holds his victims for ransom but even if the money is payed he kills them.The current case is in Clayton Country and when Lucas arrives he finds someone from his past - Samantha Burke. Samantha is a seer, she connects with people when she touches them. It is obvious from the beginning that her shared past with Lucas ended badly and she keeps baiting him. I didn't much like Samantha. Although in the end we do find out the reason behind her behaviour, I had a hard time believing she and Lucas would start a relationship without some working out their trust issues and her behaviour towards him.I think the story really works after we discover that it is personal against Lucas and when the victim also becomes someone he (and us) know. I have to admit I was thinking that their race against time would be a successful one and was a bit surprised when Hooper let go of what seemed, so far, an important character in the story. She does maintain the suspense flowing and the torture details were quite chilling.However I missed knowing more about the killer and his motivations. Since the way he worked was well described and so precise I think we needed to know more about him. As it is I felt the final revelation came a bit out of nowhere. It was still a fast and easy read that made for an enjoyable afternoon.Grade: 3.5/5
What do You think about Hunting Fear (2005)?
Good Entry in Bishop/Special Crimes Unit SeriesHaving been disappointed in the last several Bishop books because of the incomplete nature of the romance part of the story, I was more pleased with this book where there is more attention paid to the relationship between the main characters. Unfortunately, however, this book continues the trend of the major plotline being that the two main characters are keeping secrets from one another and that is the tension between them. The suspense plot, however, was very good and unexpected. THE STORY: Lucas Jordan works for the SCU and his talent is finding missing people by sensing their fear. When the SCU is brought into a case where a killer is kidnapping and murdering people after receiving ransoms, Lucas feels like a failure as he is unable to find and save the people. Lucas is obsessive and shuts out people. A serious complication that arises is a lover from his past who is also psychic.Samantha Burke is precognitive and is working as a fortune teller at a traveling fair. When she tells people they are going to be kidnapped, they don't take her seriously. Several years ago, she fell for Lucas, but he treated her poorly and abandoned her. She has inserted herself into the investigations for reasons of her own that she refuses to disclose. Lucas and Samantha are complicated and much of the time disagreeable. They both have strong walls that prevent a serious relationship between them. This book is all about how they break down those walls while hunting for a killer who is focused on Lucas.OPINION: The suspense story was really good in this one. No one is safe which is normally not the case in these types of books. The combative and testy relationship between Lucas and Samantha is frustrating at times but also integral to the story. Samantha especially is difficult to like because she is purposely pushing Lucas which makes her character seem more abrasive than normal. I did feel that this book was more balanced and complete than the more recent books.WORTH MENTIONING: Some nice cameo appearances by characters that have appeared in other books. Once again Bishop knows more than he reveals.FINAL DECISION: This book is worth the read. The unique nature of the crimes and the unexpected decisions as to the victims made the book much more compelling. I kept turning the pages to find out what was going to happen with the killer and I wanted to see what the secrets were that Lucas and Samantha possessed. I didn't like the characters as much as the previous book, but I did like the plot much better.CONNECTED BOOKS: HUNTING FEAR is the seventh book in the Bishop/SCU series but can be read as a standalone. It is also the first book of the internal Fear Trilogy.STAR RATING: I give this book 4 stars based on the suspense plot that kept me interested throughout.
—Sheila Melo
Up until this book I had enjoyed reading Kay Hooper’s Bishop/Special Crimes Unit series. Each book was a new adventure and I totally had a little crush on Bishop. I took a break before this book because I had a ton of new books to read, but that break didn’t matter. I jumped right back into the SCU world like I’d never left. This time around we focused on Lucas Jordan and his abilities and of course there was a girl that made his life more interesting. The relationship between Lucas and Sam was great. I loved that they had a past and a difficult one at that. I loved how they played off of each other and how Sam needled Lucas whenever she could. They are by far my favorite couple so far in this series, even surpassing Bishop and Miranda. The killer was exceptionally creepy, which made me love this book more so for the first time in the series, I gave one of the books 5 out of 5 stars. I just wish we got to see the couples after their story more often. I would love to explore Sam and Lucas’s relationship more.
—Paris
A friend gave me this book and it sat in my bookshelf for a long time before I read it. If I'd known it was this good, I would have read it sooner!It centres around an FBI unit made up of psychics, although they keep a pretty low profile because of public skepticism. They're hunting a serial killer who kidnaps a victim, collects the ransom and then leaves the victim somewhere to die to see if the psychic can find them. At the start of the book, only one victim has lived so the pressure on the unit is huge to catch the killer.This is the first in a trilogy and I look forward to reading the others. The book is well written and the story and characters are believable.
—Cardmaker
