‘Through Violet Eyes’ – Stephen Woodworth (Piatkus)

Something I’ve realised recently, after reading Diana Rowland’s ‘Mark of the Demon’, is that I’m a bit of a fan of urban fantasy with a police procedural edge to it. This is quite strange as I’ve never felt the urge to pick up a straight police procedural novel (the closest I’ve come is Raymond Chandler’s ‘Phillip Marlowe’ books) but found myself wanting ‘Mark of the Demons’ to downplay its urban fantasy element and concentrate on the detective work. Is this a sign of a new direction that the blog will be taking? Erm... no :o) It’s more of a sign of how I like urban fantasy to read, an emphasis on the ordinary but with just enough ‘other worldliness’ to provide the spark. Anyway...
The blurb for ‘Through Violet Eyes’ sounded like it could be just my thing so I bumped it up the reading list accordingly. It wasn’t a bad read; not amazingly great either but certainly one that kept me reading all the way through to the end.

If you’re born with violet coloured eyes then you are lucky (or unlucky) enough to be able to channel the dead and have them speak through you. The flip side is that your life can never truly be your own in a world where violet eyes are a rare commodity and those people with them are destined to be strictly controlled by a society that wants to communicate with the dead.
But now the ‘Violets’ themselves are being targeted by a serial killer who has learned how to keep his identity a secret (this is a world where the dead can testify in court). FBI agent Dan Atwater is on the case with the aid of ‘Violet’ Natalie Lindstrom but can they track the killer down before he strikes again?

The thing that I love about this book, before I even got to the ins and outs of the plot, is that although ‘Through Violet Eyes’ is a police procedural it doesn’t limit itself to that in terms of describing the world in which the ‘Violet’ phenomena occurs. Violets’ aren’t just there to help in police cases; they also perform a range of other tasks as well as allowing the dead to carry on doing what they were doing when they were alive (in certain cases). Certain composers are still writing music two hundred years after they died... The afterlife is also intriguing to read about with its hints (of more to follow) that are never expanded upon which give the reader tantalising glimpses of a strange New World. The net result is a world that’s familiar but, at the same time, has enough of the strange going on to keep people reading. It certainly kept me reading!
I found this world to be the ideal backdrop for the plot and characters to hang off. It was a shame then that they didn’t hang quite as well as they could have...

I as engrossed by the plot but although I had fun with it I couldn’t help feeling that I’d read it before. The concept of a killer who can hide from the dead is a good one and the resulting twists and turns of the plot kept me guessing although I found that the ‘red herring’ sub plot was sign posted a little too obviously to fool me. I was interested to see what it was all about but at no point was I left thinking that this guy was the killer. Because it was sign posted so clearly I was left watching Atwater and Lindstrom work towards an obvious conclusion rather than getting in there with them. The issue of ‘sign posting’ sums up the problem I had reading ‘Through Violet Eyes’. Although the flesh of the story was tasty enough, there was a very rhythmic feel to the plot that robbed certain climatic scenes of their potential to truly stir the blood. After a couple of chapters I could see the red herrings and blind alleys coming a mile off…

While I had fun getting to know the characters, in terms of how they reacted to what the plot threw up, I was again left feeling that I’d come across them far too many times before. Atwater is a typical FBI agent with a tortured past while Lindstrom is the gifted psychic who cannot afford to let people get too close to her. When a book features two main characters like this… well… you know what’s going to happen next. And it does. This isn’t a bad thing in itself but I found that time spent waiting for this to happen was time not spent wondering how their relationship would work out. Sometimes I want to find out what happens next, not have it made so clear…

Despite all this though, ‘Through Violet Eyes’ was one of those books where I found myself skipping to the end to find out what happened. When I find myself doing this then it’s clear that the book has got me hooked in the right way. ‘Through Violet Eyes’ certainly did this. It may be lightweight and predictable but it was one hell of a lot of fun to read.

Seven and a Half out of Ten