Book Review: A Killer’s Mind by Mike Omer

I was in the mood for some serial-killer thrillers, so I picked up A Killer’s Mind by Mike Omer on a whim.

I was not quite sure what to expect since this author was new to me, but after finishing the story, I have just added Mike Omer as one of my new favorite thriller authors.

A Killer’s Mind is the first book in a new series titled Zoe Bentley (which is the name of one of the two main characters in the book).

Zoe is a civilian, however, she is consulting with the FBI as a forensic psychologist, many who call this profession a profiler.

Zoe is deeply in a case when she is suddenly pulled of it and directed to Chicago to another urgent case.

What she doesn’t know is that she has been specifically requested by the FBI Agent Tatum Grey, who can’t get on well with the local PD and needs exactly her skills to get rid of the current profiler the Chicago PD works with, a guy who is nothing but a pompous talking head.

When Zoe finds this out, she is not overly thrilled, but she goes along with the story. Eventually, both Tatum and Zoe end up working the baffling case of an embalmer who kills his victims before turning them into life-size dolls.

Zoe has her own demons from that past that constantly torment her. She is sure the killer from so many years ago in her small town was a guy she knew, yet the police would never listen to her theories from back when she was 14 years old. And now, the old case seems to close in on her just as she is working the new one along with Tatum.

The book is told from the two points of view of the main characters. Usually, I am not very fond of this technique, however, here it didn’t bother me at all, maybe because I really enjoyed reading both Tatum and Zoe’s thoughts about each other and the case.

There is an attraction there between them, despite their very rocky start, and I am curious to see if anything develops between them in the next books.

Zoe is an interesting character. She has never been taken seriously as a child and young-adult with her serial-killer theories, so she has developed a thick shell, a wall, which manifests itself through her being snarky and cold. Yet, Tatum manages to find the warmth inside her and to reveal the real person she is.

She is not very good with people’s skills and often angers her peers through her bluntness.

The writing is spot on, and the story flows well. There are no earth-shattering reveals here; the story is a typical serial-killer thriller. Still, the details that emerged kept me totally focused on the plot, and in suspense pretty much all the time.

The ending did leave a nice taste of what it is to come in the next book. And things don’t look all too rosy for Zoe, even though she will be officially teamed with Tatum based on how well they worked (albeit initially reluctantly) together. But there is one case that she hasn’t managed to close, and that case will come back in book 2 to torment both her and her sister, who was just a baby when the old crimes happened in Zoe’s hometown.

I can’t wait to read the sequel for this book, which is out sometimes in 2019.