Review: A dark tale about clairvoyance and murder
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 07 14, 2013
A dark, chilling tale that centers around one special girl, Joe, and her quest to stop a wanna-be mass murderer. Joe is a 21 year old college student at the University of Midwest Missouri State (UMMS) who, in her own words, is "...no exceptional beauty." She pretty much stays to herself and doesn't speak often, due to a pronounced stutter. She doesn't truly fit in, nor does she want to. You see, what makes Joe special is that sometimes she can see the future. Not like a Madame Zara fortune teller, but rather in snippets of events that will come to pass. She sees the mundane, she sees the somewhat serious, and in some situations, she sees the truly dreadful, horrific future...cataclysmic, huge events. Those types of events are preceded by an itching in her left palm, followed by an almost trancelike state where she unconsciously draws a depiction of the event with the No. 2 pencil that she always carries.One morning as she sits in her American Literature class she has one of these episodes, and when she glances down at what's been drawn, she sees a gruesome depiction of a mass shooting. Even worse than that, she recognizes the location as being on her campus in an area called 'The Quad'. Joe knows that this event will come to pass in just a few short days...unless she can find a way to stop it. But how?The narrative bounces back and forth between several characters who inevitably play different parts as the story unfolds. One of these characters is the would-be mass murderer himself, and we get a glimpse into the mind of a crazed psychopath. Fueled by his desire to have 'the largest body count' of any school shooting in history, he pushes himself to think of and plan for any contingency. But what he doesn't plan on is the clairvoyance of Joe, the raven-haired girl.This story gripped me from the very beginning, when I was first introduced into the mind of the killer. The characters are well developed and likable, and the plot kept me guessing until the very end. I would recommend this book for mature readers 16+, for some disturbing material.This book made it to my favorites shelf! Kudos to author H.D. Gordon.