EYE OF THE STAR

A cop and a psychic try to stop a rogue Russian agent in Kohno’s first paranormal thriller in a series.

There’s a psychic terrorist on the loose in the environs of Franklin, Oregon. At least, that’s what psychic consultant Gilda Dobrowski tells police detective Jim Sato. Jim and Gilda worked together on a case a few years back, and he admires her abilities, but he doesn’t know what to make of a warning that Gilda has supposedly received from the terror suspect: “Beware the Final Solution.” With Jim’s permission, Gilda uses his body to channel the terrorist, a former KGB agent who identifies himself as Sergei Verenich. He states that he wants to take revenge on the United States for the CIA’s actions during the Cold War. But if the pair can follow his clues and find him before his plan goes into action, they can save millions of lives. Jim and Gilda are sent on a wild chase after the psychic villain, who manages to pull off deadly bombings and other attacks in Oregon and elsewhere. As the pair race to stop him, they can’t help but wonder why Sergei chose them for this mission. Kohno’s blend of the classic crime-caper format with telepathic characters makes for an intriguing fictional world. However, for a novel that’s so interested in psychological profiles, the characters are disappointingly underdeveloped. There are some good lines, as when Jim rejects one of Sergei’s possible motivations: “Old Oedipus is dead and gone and Freud along with him. We’re talking about power and authority, not sex churning away in the subconscious.” More often, though, characters speak like they’re in a bad action movie, right down to a stereotypical rendering of police officers’ accents in the city of New Orleans, which Jim and Gilda visit later in the story. The writing’s inconsistent quality sometimes lessens the impact of more subtle threads, such as how Jim, who’s Japanese American, faces difficulties doing his job because of others’ bigotry. A lot happens in terms of plot, but rarely does any of it feel substantial, which prevents this offbeat genre mashup from fully coming to life.

A paranormal crime novel that doesn’t rise to the level of its ambitions.