Det Kaitlyn Kruse has a very unusual ability: she dreams about her past lives, and the memories help her solve her cases, often through the professional knowledge of her past selves. When investigating a crime on a Seattle hiking trail, Kruse and her partner Joe think they may have found the body of a missing woman, but the investigation turns up several. A serial killer is on the loose in Seattle. Can Kruse stop the killer?

I think this is a really interesting premise and a nice twist on the thriller/crime genre. A Detective with a special ability, and also that ability being able to access past lives. Since the four past lives she can remember are as an archeologist, a nurse, a surgeon and a psychologist, the idea is that her subconscious accesses relevant experiences or knowledge from those past lives in dreams, and of course, those professional knowledge bases are especially helpful to her current life work.

This is a debut novel, and was written by a Vancouver native, though the author now lives in Nebraska, and this book also contains chapters of the next book in the series.

I don’t want to be too harsh with a debut novel, but this one does suffer from a few issues. While it opens with us being dropped right into the action of finding the body of the missing girl on the trail, which I liked, it felt like from there, the author wasn’t sure where to go. We know there’s a serial killer on the loose, but our lead takes on the case like it’s a lesser crime, like a burglary, and casually questions the few people who may have gone on a date with the deceased. This takes up most of the first part of the book and feels very dry and repetitive. It could have been a few sentences or paragraphs, not whole chapters. The way that Kruse locks her door and her evening routine also is repeatedly described each evening. More plot and les procedure would strengthen this.

Speaking of procedure, the author seems less than assured in the way her main character does her job. Mostly its not too glaring, but at one point, Kruse wonders if someone might be a criminal because they binge watch CSI, which is quite a leap. I’d hate to know what she’d think of me based on my viewing history, in that case. In another place, she explains to us things like what a criminals MO is, as if we don’t already know this basic info, and then also gets it’s wrong, confusing it with victimology. Little details like this undermine the story a little bit.

The characters are a little flat, perhaps. Kruse’s partner Joe seems like a classic trope of police fiction, and then has the one wacky trait of wearing brightly coloured shoelaces. I wondered how that worked. Does he change them every day or just have an inordinate amount of the same pairs of shoes? There’s not a lot of banter or humour that you might expect between friends or workplace colleagues, which feels like a missed trick: it builds a sense of relationship between characters while also giving exposition, allowing the author to cut down on straight description that can slow down a narrative. Kruse has a best friend who feels like the best friend character out of chick lit. What do she and Kruse have in common?

I think these are fairly common things that debut novels suffer from, and while overall it made for dull reading at times for me, there were things I did like. It’s a nice fast read, which is excellent for a mystery or crime novel. I think the way the past lives come up in the dreams are well paced and enigmatic enough, it works. And there are moments that I found myself smiling at Kruse, like when she thinks about how amazing cadaver dogs are and their sense of smell, and she wonders how they must perceive the world with all that sensory information that we don’t have. I think that’s just a nice, interesting observation and it made me like her.

In the face of a wide range of series in this thriller/crime genre, with seasoned hands at their helm, writers who are assured and have this kind of novel down to an art, this book is bound to suffer from comparison. But taken as an entertaining, lighter, quick read with a super natural element, it’s fine. It’s a little dull and repetitive in places, a little outlandish in others, but if you like a thriller with a little bit of something unusual or supernatural, a bit more drama than police procedural, it’s a new series in the field, and I think it will find it’s audience.

Read It If: with it’s serial killer and past lives, police jargon and a promise of more to follow, if you’re looking for a quick read thriller with an occult edge or a thriller series, this could be for you.

Thank you to PGC Books for the copy of this book for review.