I'm Out

I started to review a book that I'd read a few weeks ago about an FBI Special Agent who specialized in tracking serial killers. He has a kind of sixth sense that allows him to track people's essences, which appear to him as splashes of color left on things that they touched. From these splashes he can identify a person if he encounters them again and he can trail them like a regular tracker might, only using the sense he calls his "shine" ("Ahem" - Stephen King) to do so instead of physical clues. It also lets him sense if a victim is still alive, or when they are killed.

In order to cover what would almost certainly be inadmissible evidence in court, the character has a friend help cover for him and he acts out the finding the same kind of physical clues that an ordinary tracker might. The friend and co-worker is the only one who knows his secret.

As I said, I started to review it, but decided against it. While the author left out the cheap sadism of the victim's-eye-accounts of their torments and deaths he more or less sneaked it back in through the ESP bond of the "shine." Aside from the supernatural (or maybe it was supposed to be a form of synesthesia, although that doesn't work like that and I don't remember anyway) color business, it was just another dead girl novel and I've been getting tired of those.

I'd love to hear someone interview the author of one of these books -- or the director of one of these movies -- and ask if we were supposed to enjoy the victim's assault more, or her murder? They'd probably say those segments were there to increase the tension, or clearly outline the evil, or some other such. They weren't there to be enjoyed. Which would, if I were the interviewer, prompt an immediate follow-up: Then why did you spend so much time with them?