In the quiet solitude of upstate New York, retired NYPD detective David Gurney should be enjoying his new found time with his wife Madeleine. Instead he seems unable to let go, spending nearly every moment working on a photo-art project where he gazes into the eyes of killers. One day he receives a call from an old college acquaintance, seems he’s been receiving threatening letters from a stranger who has the uncanny ability to guess what he’s thinking.
Though having been pleaded to help, Gurney is more and more intrigued as the communications escalate and people start losing their lives. When the game gets the better of him, Gurney finds himself matching wits with a cop hating psycho, who’s determined to see them all die.

This book is very slow to start, with nearly 100 pages before the plot amps up, but soon wanes as veteran police officers gather to discuss the case. A tedious conversation about guns, silencers, evidence collection and autopsy results ensues, boring me to the point of tears, causing me to skim a majority of the next couple chapters, and essentially stopping an otherwise engaging mystery in it’s tracks.

The storyline, the character development, the main course that provides an exceptional thriller are all there, but the stop and go for characters to tell each other things that go without saying, things they should just know, is simply too distracting, causing the puzzle to lose it’s shock value. And just when I thought that it might redeem itself in the end with the revelation that the poetic psycho is someone close to our clever detective, I was left with the same old same old.

I’ll have forgotten it in…wait, what was that?