Psychotherapist Gurian, the bestselling author of numerous parenting and psychology books (The Wonder of Girls; The Soul of the Child), has written a riveting supernatural suspense novel that tracks the efforts of a psychic to find a serial killer in Spokane, Wash. The novel begins when a clairvoyant, cancer-stricken boy is run down by a car. At the accident scene where he dies, an otherworldly light hovers over his body and suffuses the neighborhood. Soon afterward, his nurse, Beth Carey, has visions of children being murdered. Her hallucinations turn out to be premonitions: a serial murderer who calls himself the Light Killer begins to terrorize Spokane, killing several children and sending letters to the local paper explaining his garbled philosophy ("The Creator inhales darkness and exhales light. This is how I feel when I hold the [dying] child in my arms, that I can breathe again, breathe Light again"). Beth, suspecting that the killer was influenced by the same mysterious light that gave her psychic powers, searches for him, hoping to forge a connection with this doppelgänger and keep him from killing again. Gurian infuses the story with his own ideas about the nature of the divine and the dawning of a new kind of human being with spiritual intuition. Some may be turned off by the New Age tone, but even skeptics will find the murder mystery gripping. Gurian delicately ups the tension with each successive murder, and the climax is stunning enough to make the shaky spiritual conceit work. (May 22)
