The Screaming Knife

Rating:
Summary: Worth reading as the start of a neat series
Review: This is the first in the Peter Thorne mystery series, and the characters are a lot of fun. As a mystery, this book has some shortcomings, but I highly recommend reading it anyway because the following books in the series just keep getting better and better. The fun starts here. Peter Thorne is a Houdini-like character, knowledgeable about magic and escapes and thus able to debunk the psychic shenanigans present in the San Francisco area. At the same time, though, he possesses a single psychic ability that enables him to assist local police in solving crimes. Naturally, he wonders how his psychic ability is possible, and seeks to have it investigated and hopefully explained in rational terms by local researchers at a university. This series is a breath of much-needed fresh air in an entertainment culture that has gotten outrageous in assuming that the paranormal exists in every possible form. In contrast, this series is careful to ground itself in known realities and then propose an exception to known reality, thus capturing the essence of what the supernatural is supposed to be about in fiction! "The Resonance of Blood" and "Death Channels" follow in the series...
Main drawback is that, following in the tradition of the mystery genre, the books sometimes include many lurid details of crime and horror.