Into the Fire

Steven James begins his series of Patrick Bowers’ thrillers with a story that will have you searching the parking lot as you walk out to your car, checking out strange or unfamiliar vehicles, people, situations, and every time you’re missing something you think you should have when really you’ve just set it down somewhere else, you’ll momentarily freeze. No kidding. So if you’re prone to being overly fearful, you might not want to read this novel about more than one extremely intelligent, methodical, narcissists who have been unique styles of killers for a long time.

The protagonist, brilliant Patrick Bowers, PhD, is a recovering widower (yes, another loss of spouse) with an alienated teenage step-daughter who stays with his parents while he travels the country for the FBI doing geospatial profiling of serial killers. Her conduct toward Patrick appears to be just this side of hatred.

Patrick’s grief has morphed into anger bordering on rage at times, especially as he and his close friend, Special Agent Ralph Hawkins, and the attractive Special Agent Lien Hua head up the search for the identity of a killer who leaves a chess pawn at crime scenes, ties a yellow ribbon in the victims’ hair, and is meticulous about leaving no evidence while instead placing nearly hidden clues with present victims alluding to future victims. He has dubbed himself “The Illusionist”.

But that’s only a portion of this complex plot which includes a politician, once a clandestine CIA operative, a survivor of the Jim Jones’ cult and how that survivor’s past becomes linked with the aforementioned killer and the prominent politician.

While primarily written from Patrick Bowers’ first person POV, the POV slides in and out of the smugness of the killer’s thoughts, shifts to the politician’s plans, darts to the superfluous, merciless plottings of the cult survivor, and occasionally includes those biting, hurtful, or terrified expressions of his step-daughter Tessa’s needs.

Personally speaking, I love a plethora of characters, including their back-story and all things which allude to what makes them tick. I like the back and forth of present to past or past to present. In that respect The Pawn worked for me.

I’ll tell you what didn’t quite work as well for me, and that is the ambition of the plot. I’m not sure that the tying in of the Jones’ cult member and the CIA politics along with the serial killer wasn’t too much. The story of “The Illusionist” was both enticing in that horrible, thriller way and mesmerizing without the other tie-ins. I remember feeling a bit disappointed as the story began to veer away from the solving of the killings to incorporate these other villains and their relationship to the murderer. Somehow in the mix, I never felt like I quite learned in a definitive way why “The Illusionist” seemed to have his sights set on singling out and outsmarting Patrick Bowers just because he’d read two of his books for research and considered him a “worthy opponent”. As the dots were being connected between all these plot pieces, and the chess board manipulations and sacrifices of the pawns were made, I did experience some confusion as to where my focus should be—that is, as to who specifically did the author intend for the story to be about besides Patrick Bowers and his attempt to assemble all the clues before too many more people were murdered.

As a writer, I can understand the desire for the author of a thriller to keep a reader guessing and to make a complex plot that darts and dashes from one suspect to another while hiding some in “plain view”. The intrigue is high-level in this novel, but it seemed as though Mr. James might’ve pulled in a few too many villains to keep the story moving seamlessly. I thought he did a nice job of throwing the reader off and building the suspense, but the focus just seemed to change at the mid-point and become a bit of a different story.

The ending was positive, inconclusive, and suggestive, paving the way for another mystery/thriller due out later this year entitled The Rook. I enjoyed this novel—the man can definitely write—and will continue on with the series in hopes that maybe the second leg of this adventure will be more tightly focused. Patrick Bowers succumbs to a foxhole spiritual awakening of sorts in the final dramatic events after harboring a resentment toward God the entire story due to his wife’s dying, even though she died a believer. So for me it will be interesting to see how Mr. James handles the spirituality of his protagonist in the next book. Granted the so-called “lesson” suggested by the novel points to the thin line between good and evil in all of us, but the real fabric of the novel for me reveals the debilitating emptiness of an individual who suffers a terrible loss with no one but himself to provide comfort.

Father, thank you for the wonderful talent of Steven James. You gift so many people with outstanding abilities. Please help Steven to continue to seek after you and what you have for him to do. Give him your direction and leading in all he does. In the Name of Jesus, Amen.