Stop me if you’ve heard this one before – a female psychic works with skeptical but desperate police to catch a serial killer, who may be targeting the psychic herself. Meanwhile, the psychic and one of the law enforcement guys fall in love. Yeah, I thought it sounded like any number of other books, too (not to mention Lifetime movies), most notably Dream Man by Linda Howard. Dream Man, by the way, just became my new benchmark for the perfect confection of nailbiting suspense and hot sexy romance.

So it may be doing Kay Hooper’s new romantic suspense novel, Stealing Shadows, a disservice to read it so close on the heels of Dream Man, since both contain those psychic/serial killer/law guy elements. Stealing Shadows is no Dream Man. But once I got past that, I found that I had a fairly good suspense novel on my hands.

Stealing Shadows is nothing that breaks out of the typical psychic-hunting-killer-who-stalks-her storyline, but it does have some neat twists. The suspense part of the story will keep you up late at night. Hooper does a good job of making you wonder who the killer is (though I felt just a bit cheated somehow by the ultimate solution) and a very good job of keeping you in the dark as to who the victims are going to be.

The main characters grabbed me, as both are darker and more melancholy than your typical hero and heroine. Cassie (as in Cassandra, the seeress whom no one believes) has spent her whole life fighting monsters. Her mother, also psychic, raised Cassie to recognize that her abilities gave her this responsibility. But Cassie has never had anything approaching a normal life. She is exhausted, untrusting, solitary and fatalistic. She is intrigued by district attorney Ben Ryan, one of the few people “closed” to her. What do his internal “walls” hide and how did they come about?

Cassie’s seen-it-all demeanor and Ben’s careful distance make for a potentially intriguing romance plotline: how will these two overcome the obstacles in their own personalities? Unfortunately, they don’t overcome them, they simply ignore them. I found the concept of a viable relationship between them really unbelievable. Every time Cassie told Ben to stay away from her, that she would never be good for a man, I had to agree. Every time Ben noticed how needy Cassie seemed to be in her isolation, I shuddered. Fragility is not high on my list of things one should look for in a partner.

The mystery plot concluded reasonably satisfactorily. However, the plot device used to tie up the romance plot felt utterly forced, even cheesy, and left way too much untold for me. So much was made of Ben’s “walls” but you never learn why they were there, and how he “took them down” – he just did. In the end, I would give this book a B as a suspense novel and a D as a romance; my final grade is an average of the two.

However, the character of mysterious FBI agent Noah Bishop, who promises to return in the next two Kay Hooper books, was very interesting and will keep me coming back to the series. He’s another one with dark secrets and a mysterious past (and somehow, despite the book’s description of him, I kept picturing David Duchovny for some reason) and I look forward to seeing more of him.