Into the Fire

All Souls, A Gatehouse Thriller (#1) by K. T. Kaufman (aka Karin Kaufman), is available on Kindle for readers who enjoy contemporary speculative thrillers.

K. T. Kaufman has written a thoughtful, disturbing story for the first book in her Gatehouse Thriller Series. Jane Piper is a hunter of "Sacks". Sacks are those who kill "innocents" assigned to them by upper echelon members of their organization. Just as these innocents' names appear on a list, so do those mysteriously dubbed Sacks' names come down from Gatehouse to those in charge (called "porters") of the hunters. The hunters have been personally affected by the Sacks' killings, losing a loved one at their merciless hands. Jane lost her younger sister to a ruthless, brutal killer, and her parents blamed her after the tragedy. As a result, she applied to be a hunter at Gatehouse.

So, are the hunters primarily vigilantes dispatched by their porters via Gatehouse to impart justice? Are they just people hell-bent on revenge? Are they really sadistic hedonists as their counterparts appear to be? How exactly do they view their roles in the heirarchy of murder?

There appears to be a serious leak in the Gatehouse leadership which puts Nathan, Jane's porter, Jane, and fellow hunter Zach on the run. Supposedly there's a woman who has turned away from her high-ranking Sack position to defect to Gatehouse. Nathan vetted her and is convinced she's legitimate, but Jane and Zach aren't as certain because of her hideous crime as a Sack. When all of their lives are threatened and it seems the "safe" houses are coming under constant Sack attack, Nathan and his friend Claude, number 3 in the Gatehouse leadership, must find a way to keep the four of them from being killed by the relentless assaults from groups of low-ranking Sacks who used to work alone.

Jane's, Zach's, Nathan's, and Claude's constant running, their incessant need for sleep, and the twist you know is coming but aren't sure exactly what it's going to be, are very well done by Kaufman. The story doesn't dawdle, and the threats, the new exposures, and the need to discover the culprits keep those Kindle pages clicking to the next one. There's a considerable amount of profanity used in this general market offering, but God does make it into the final pages more as a reckoning and revelation to the heroine who can't quite ferret out the difference between justification and redemption. This process seems to lay the groundwork for both the title and the development of Jane Piper in future books.

I could not decide if All Souls fit into any of the following classifications:

"Allegory is a literary device in which characters or events in a literary, visual, or musical art form represent or symbolize ideas and concepts." Wikipedia

"A parody (/'pær?di/; also called spoof, send-up or lampoon), in current use, is an imitative work created to mock, comment on or trivialise[citation needed] an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of satiric or ironic imitation. As the literary theorist Linda Hutcheon puts it, "parody … is imitation, not always at the expense of the parodied text." Another critic, Simon Dentith, defines parody as "any cultural practice which provides a relatively polemical allusive imitation of another cultural production or practice."[1] Parody may be found in art or culture, including literature, music (although "parody" in music has an earlier, somewhat different meaning than for other art forms), animation, gaming and film." Wikipedia

The American Heritage Dictionary's secondary meaning for irony: "incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs".[5] This sense, however, is not synonymous with "incongruous" but merely a definition of dramatic or situational irony. It is often included in definitions of irony not only that incongruity is present but also that the incongruity must reveal some aspect of human vanity or folly. Thus the majority of American Heritage Dictionary's usage panel found it unacceptable to use the word ironic to describe mere unfortunate coincidences or surprising disappointments that "suggest no particular lessons about human vanity or folly." Wikipedia 

An interesting conceptual novel, not generally my type, but All Souls is a quick, well-written read and a good first entry to this series. 

Father, you know how hard Karin works, you know her heart, you know her desires. Please continue to bless her efforts to do as you ask, to honor you, and to be the one you designed her to be. Encourage her as only you can do. In the Name of Jesus, Amen.