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A psychopath is killing young co-eds in Washington, D.C., and presenting them as sacrificial gifts to the goddess Kali. He sees himself as a modern-day Thuggee—Kali’s followers who murdered over a million India travelers in the 1800s.
Deputy Chief Cory Swink of the Arlington County Police Department is all out of answers, and he’s taking heat from the chief, who’s pressuring him to find this guy. In desperation, he turns to Lars Neilsen and his Alpha Team. They can get results where he can’t.
Lars, a college professor and part-time sleuth, heads a team that aids the police department in finding criminals—except that they sort of work outside the law. Most of the time, Lars would rather execute the suspect instead of bringing him in. Since his team is not an official arm of the law, he figures that they can do what needs to be done, without their hands being tied. More or less, they’re glorified vigilantes. And, haunted by the last victim’s eyes, Lars has no intentions of bringing in her killer alive.
It’s in the Eyes isn’t really much of a thriller—not to mention that very little of this novel works within the law, since half of what the Alpha Team does to catch the criminal would be thrown out of court.
The story gets bogged down in too much character exposition. While it’s good to have well-rounded characters, these characters are pointy more than they are round. For instance, I didn’t really care to know that Lars is impotent—or how he fixes that in bed. I also didn’t need to know every time Tiger burped or passed gas. And I didn’t need Doris to bread down suddenly, out of the blue, and tell Lars that she was molested by a priest as a child. None of those characterizations had anything to do with the plot.
The story, meanwhile, wasn’t developed enough to hold my interest. I wanted to read more about the investigation of the victims’ deaths and less about Lars’s ogling every female who walked past him (and I could have done without his very male thoughts on the females, too). The plot and the characters seem to meander all over the place, going off on tangents that have very little to do with the murder mystery.
Since this is a self-published novel, I wasn’t surprised to find the usual beginner mistakes and distractions. But, to put it simply, It’s in the Eyes is an unpleasant, frustrating story, and I wouldn’t recommend giving it a go. Instead, I recommend Inquest on Imhotep, a stronger self-published novel by Derek Adie Flower.
