Hiding in the Shadows
Grade : B+

I can't believe I waited this long to read something by Kay Hooper! This is the best suspense story I've read lately, with a good psychological twist at the end that's as surprising as the one in the movie The Sixth Sense. It may make some readers unhappy, though.

Dinah Leighton is an investigative journalist who disappears as she's working on a story. A few days later, Faith Parker awakens from a coma that no one ever thought she'd come out of. Faith has total amnesia about her life before the accident. Apparently Dinah was Faith's only friend. She visited her in the hospital and left money for Faith to live on after she left the hospital. As Faith tries to remember her own life, she becomes caught up in Dinah's. She goes to Dinah's lover Kane, and they work with FBI agent Noah Bishop to find Dinah.

Readers meet Dinah at the beginning of the story. She's introduced long enough for us to get a brief glimpse of her personality and her life with Kane, and then Faith takes over as heroine. Faith awakens from her coma with a psychic ability: she starts experiencing Dinah's memories and establishes a link with her. Faith is able to hear Dinah's voice in her mind and see brief glimpses of what happens to her.

Kane immediately believes Faith's story and takes her in to live with him while they search for Dinah. He's completely in love with Dinah and desperately holds on to the belief that Dinah will be found alive. He's a general good guy with few faults.

Agent Bishop is an intriguing character, who, I believe, is the link between the books in this trilogy. Hiding in the Shadows stands ably alone, however. I haven't read Stealing Shadows (although I certainly will now), but I never felt lost.

I wouldn't really categorize this as romantic suspense (the spine says only "Novel", not fiction or romantic fiction) because the romance is not a major part of the story. The love between Dinah and Kane is briefly glimpsed when they're together at the beginning, but it's mostly seen as he tries to find her. There's an attraction between him and Faith, but it's an undercurrent that adds tension to the plot as a whole and is quietly resolved at the end.

Hooper throws in enough secondary characters to function as red herrings so that I never saw the real villains coming. Perhaps some of the more astute readers out there will, but it was a complete surprise to me.

One little question is left hanging about Faith's accident. They figured out what didn't cause it, but they never learned what exactly did cause it, which probably would have answered questions about her amnesia.

There's not much I can say about the twist at the end without spoiling the story, which I definitely don't want to do. Some readers may feel a bit betrayed, but I just loved it. A spoiler at another site alerted me to how this would end, and I still couldn't figure out how Hooper would do it until I got to the end. You end-peekers take note: this is one I wouldn't check.

To tell you how caught up in this story I was, I read seven-eighths of it sitting in the stands of a Texas A&M football game and totally blocked out all the screaming noise around me. Hooper wove this story in such a clever way that I couldn't put it down. I've got Stealing Shadows in first place on the TBR mountain. I can't wait for the next one.

Reviewed by Andrea Pool
Grade : B+

Sensuality: Warm

Review Date : November 11, 2000

Publication Date: 2000

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