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PsyCop 4 – Secrets by Jordan Castillo Price
The story opens on a note of anxiety for first-person narrator Vic as he realizes he may have to junk many of his grungy possessions in order to move in with his boyfriend Jacob who has much more luxurious furniture. A psychic cop like Vic, who has powerful medium abilities and who sees dead people everywhere, has enough to worry about without inviting change into his life.
But he and Jacob are now the proud owners of a large brick loft apartment, converted from an old cannery, which they acquired in their third adventure, PsyCop 3 – Body and Soul. So they draft some friends to help them move: Carolyn, Jacob's psychic partner in the PsyCops program who is a human lie detector; and bad-boy Crash, an empath who used to be Jacob's ex and currently lusts after Vic. It promises to be a day filled with interpersonal tensions.
But then Jacob and Carolyn, who work the Sex Crimes division, get called to a disturbing crime scene: a nursing home. Apparently an invisible assailant is sexually assaulting an elderly, psychic lady who lives there. No one can figure out how to track down the criminal.
Meanwhile Vic has problems of his own that go beyond just fending off Crash for whom he feels a complicated mix of attraction and revulsion. His thoughts have drifted back to Camp Hell, a brutal and secret institution at which he was once an inmate. Supposedly Camp Hell functioned as a training facility for psychics like him, but he remembers it more as a laboratory in which he got experimented on. Consequently his psychic skills are self-taught and unstable.
Vic goes online only to find out that Camp Hell and its graduates are apparently so classified that they have no records at all. His own identity doesn't exist. This gives him the spooky intuition that big covert forces, possibly related to the government, are at work in his destiny. He also has a feeling that Jacob knows more than he's telling.
But he can't ask Jacob who is becoming obsessed with solving the ongoing sexual assaults at the nursing home. Jacob works long hours on the case and seems distant and preoccupied when at home. Imagine Vic's dismay when he finds out that Jacob is confiding the details of his case to Crash in a misguided attempt to keep from bringing his work home!
Just when it seems that Vic has no sidekick for this new adventure, we get the welcome return of Lisa Gutierrez, the psychic cop he met in PsyCop 1 – Among the Living, who was missing in action during PsyCop 2 and 3 as she honed her psychic skills in a much nicer training facility than Camp Hell. Lisa calls Vic from the Chicago airport in tears. She has just flown in from California to seek his guidance in her ongoing struggle with her particular psychic talent.
Lisa is a precognitive who calls her talent "si-no" (Spanish for yes-no) because she can predict the future through yes-or-no questions. But she's having trouble setting boundaries on her talent: she always ends up either running herself into the ground, or letting others do this to her, through overwork. This will become a problem as Jacob – frantic to solve the nursing home crime – tries to exploit Lisa's talent with no regard for her limits.
PsyCop 4 – Secrets is aptly named as the main characters struggle with secrets that they are keeping from each other and puzzles that they are trying to figure out. The character interactions are as sharply drawn and funny as always and the nursing home mystery provides several suspenseful and action-filled scenes. My one reservation here at ObsidianBookshelf.com concerns the cliff-hanger ending which fades out mid-scene. However, this is a strong entry into the PsyCop series, and it introduces an intriguing story arc involving Vic's classified past to be explored in the future.
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Verdant by Jordan Castillo Price. 