Keeping quiet, Josh tries to find out what he can. What follows is a dance between two agendas—Dennis wants information, too—that will blow Josh's secret, infuriate and then enlist his wife Linda, unearth a perverse and hidden crime, and bring him face to face with the forces that underlie his strange gift. And, as in any other good mystery/thriller, put himself and everyone he cares about at mortal risk.

Okay, the ‘seeing death’ thing isn’t exactly new, from M. Night Shyamalan on. But this read sports a secret weapon: characters you actually care about. Especially Josh—I just wanted to hang out at his office, seeing patients with him, joking with his co-workers, and learning about the velvet sadness at the heart of medicine, mystic or not. After snagging me there, his presence was real and ironic and alive enough to carry me through three (count ‘em, three) nestled mysteries, until I found myself running at his side, feeling every footfall in the snow, on our way to a hallucinatory showdown in a blinding mountain storm.

Call it Noir Lite. Black as pitch, with a flash of irony—and more than that, compassion—whenever you need it. This third novel by author and physician Barry Burnett (the jacket copy insists he has no metaphysical talents whatsoever) moves believably from innocence to fear to black-hearted rage and finally to a kind of wisdom. With Josh, the indomitable Linda, and even the scary Dennis as our complicated and all-too-human guides.