There were some interesting concepts, like a world grappling with empaths capable of weaponizing emotions. The overall vibe was like Minority Report or Jessica Jones or any number of comic book arcs where the populace fears what they don’t understand and therefore try to contain, convert, or corrupt. But the execution of the story failed on multiple levels.
To start, all details are reserved for the murder mystery and slowly revealing what makes empaths tick. So much time is spent on making empaths out to be a kind of super species that the rest of the world, and characters, got washed out. This story took place in Seattle, but it could have been set anywhere.
Was there ever a description of rainy days, the Needle, Reese’s sister, etc. to help me picture the people and places?
Narrator Joel Leslie excels at campy, exaggerated stories (the Hidden Species books, for example).
His style is more cartoon than comic book. Here, that style meant Reese’s sarcasm felt too cute, as if Reese was the teenage, ditzy damsel with the heart of gold instead of an adult cognizant of his empath responsibilities. Nicknaming Reese “carebear” while people around him die gruesome deaths, and while empath-phobic hate mongers do horrible things, just highlighted the feeling that I was listening to two different stories. And aside from some heavy handed dialogue about LGBTQ, this felt like your standard MF slow burn romance, with Reese as the quirky girl and the Dead Man as the dark, dangerous, emotionally unavailable guy.
The Dead Man was too aptly named. He was a robotic boogeyman so lacking in personality that I felt zero romantic chemistry. I’m sure he and Reese will eventually get together, somewhere several books down the line … only I don’t really care to wade through more books about discrimination, fear, hate and abuse in an alternate modern-day world to get to the lukewarm romance on the other end.