The Knight by Steven James Published by: Revell (2009) 492 pages Rating: 10/10 Buy it Now:    Also by Steven James: The Pawn The Rook

With most "hunt for the serial killer" novels, it's exciting to follow the hero/detective around as he/she desperately follows the clues to try to stop the notorious villain from killing again. It's just a touch frightening when the author portrays a killer with no remorse or some sort of brutal fetish.

With this latest book in the Patrick Bowers Thrillers, Steven James has taken the whole concept to a new level. I didn't find myself shivering slightly at the "delicious evil" of the villain... I found myself genuinely frightened - because I was wondering if such an amoral and yet brilliant person could really exist in our world today. If so... I certainly hope we have people like Patrick Bowers out there stopping them. Otherwise... we're all in trouble.

Obviously, The Knight continues the series involving FBI criminologist Patrick Bowers whose geospatial investigations help track down serial killers. In the previous two books, there were ongoing threats that percolated in the background, apparently leading toward some massive final showdown further along, or so the readers all expected. Steven James takes those expectations and slices them to pieces in the opening chapters of this book, making us realize that things are far worse than we thought they were. Something we thought was building toward a big confrontation ends up being just a side mission for the true villain of this volume. Now that's frightening.

The tension created by those scenes only escalates through the the rest of the book, and since this is not a short story (almost 500 pages!), that's a lot of tension. It's easily one of the most suspenseful thrillers I've read in years.

When James introduced Patrick Bowers' stepdaughter Tessa in the first book, The Pawn, he set himself up for some complicated problems in succeeding books. After all, what do you do with the detective's daughter in a series? You're stuck with relegating her totally to the sideline, just checking in on her now and then, or turning her into the obligatory target for every villain that comes along, putting her in peril each and every story (which gets old fast). Instead, James has worked hard at giving Tessa her own storyline in each book, a storyline that intersects at obvious times with her stepfather's, but not in ways that get repetitive or eye-rolling. It still unfortunately leads to occasional mixed climactic scenes in which Patrick is facing a physical threat and Tessa is dealing with an emotional problem. Without superb writing finesse, that kind of thing will frustrate readers beyond belief. I was pleased to note that I didn't even think about this kind of possibility until I was already through with the story's climax and I realized what had happened. Well done.

What? No. I'm not going to tell you anything more about the story. Isn't all of the above enough to whet your appetite? Just be careful about when you read this. You might want to make sure it's daylight outside... Highly Recommended.