Hunt the Dawn

October 31, 2016
The pursuit of a serial killer becomes a twisted, macabre trip in Roads’s gritty, fantastical second Fatal Dreams romantic thriller (after Race the Darkness). Lathan Montgomery is an FBI consultant with a genetic anomaly that burdens him with the power to read people’s emotions through their scent. He’s currently tracking a serial killer nicknamed the Strategist, a quest that has brought him to rural Ohio. Waitress Evanee Brown survived a harsh childhood with her sexually abusive mother and stepfamily. Evanee suffers from nightmares, born of trauma, that turn even more ominous as the ghosts of the Strategist’s victims reach out to her through a parallel universe. Lathan and Evanee, caught up in the serial killer’s orbit, become lovers, with a powerful physical connection that’s tied to a Native American spirit. Roads’s grim novel has ample suffering; it largely succeeds as a fantasy of good versus evil, but its heavy-handed depravity becomes tedious as the story progresses, and readers may look askance at the use of Lathan’s paranormal abilities to balance out his hearing impairment.

December 1, 2016
With one whiff of a woman's perfume, Lathan Montgomery can see her most intimate secrets through his whirling left eye. His special abilities to detect scent memories make solving cold cases for the FBI a breeze, but there's one killer who has continually eluded him, the Strategist. Evanee's life of sexual abuse has always led to nightmares, but it wasn't until she met Lathan that these nightmares turned into something more. Her White Place now allows her to see inside the mind of a serial killer, the very one Lathan has been hunting. When Evanee awakens from her first dream with an eyeball in her hand, Lathan knows that with their powers they can finally stop the man that haunts him. Roads continues her suspenseful, paranormal Fatal Dreams series, begun by Race the Darkness (2016), delving deeper into the mystical forces that unite Lathan and Evanee. Though both are loners at heart, they find themselves drawn together by their powers and something more, an older force that neither can deny.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)