EYES TO SEE

Start of a new urban supernatural series, from the author of The Heretic (2010, etc.)

Once a Harvard classics professor, first-person narrator Jeremiah Hunt's life fell apart when his young daughter, Elizabeth, was abducted from their Boston home and, despite intense police activity, never found. Hunt, obsessed, takes up the search on his own, eventually turning to the supernatural. After an unpleasant ritual, he find that he's virtually blind—but, in exchange, he can see in total darkness . . . and the darkness is full of ghosts and other more malevolent entities. He can also identify others, "Gifted," who have supernatural abilities. So, while continuing to search for Elizabeth, he takes up the profession of ghostbuster. Miles Stanton, the homicide detective who worked Elizabeth's case and thinks Hunt is a psychic, calls him in for odd jobs. The latest of these is a baffling murder, the victim ritually posed, with no evident cause of death, the walls of the room scrawled with words and symbols in various arcane languages. A second murder occurs, almost identical to the first, and Hunt begins to discern a pattern. He realizes he will need help and turns to Irish pub owner Dmitri Alexandrov—his Gift isn't immediately obvious—and powerful witch Denise Clearwater. They identify dozens of connected killings going back years. Evidently a powerful and malicious being has a plan under way—but what, and how is Hunt involved? A well constructed backdrop, sturdy plot, and characters who develop along with the story, undermined by a certain want of originality, and almost fatally riven by passages of omniscient narrative that Nassise unaccountably fails to integrate into his protagonist's perception of events.

Not altogether convincing, but it probably has enough going for it to tempt the fans back for more.