Abby Cooper, Psychic Eye
Psychic Eye Mystery series, No. 1

By Victoria Laurie

    Victoria Laurie is a professional psychic who has crossed over into mystery fiction. Abby Cooper, Psychic Eye is the first in a series that will be hitting bookstore shelves over the next year. Laurie has two more full-length books in the works, Better Read Than Dead coming out in June and Ghost of Honor following in December. And, coming in February, Laurie will join authors Elaine Viets, Nancy Martin, and Denise Swanson in a quartet of stories called Drop Dead Blonde.

    Abby Cooper, the psychic in the first novel in this series, is lovable and honest. She does pick up her psychic "phone line" as she calls it and manages to avoid some nasty situations, but independence gets her into trouble and sometimes into deadly pinches. In this first story, Abby gets involved with a series of murders and becomes the target of the killer herself. She gets some great help, which she often refuses in her own bravado, from hunky police detective Dutch Rivers. She also gets way too much help from her rich sister Cat who wants to give her everything.

   Abby's predictions are dead on and offer a refreshing way to drop clues in a mystery and follow up on them. Laurie's drafting of the character of Abby Cooper is a welcome relief to the stereotypical psychics often portrayed in mystery and crime fiction. Abby is an ordinary person, with issues and quirks, who has an extraordinary gift.

  The only thing I found a bit unusual about Abby Cooper, psychic, was the fact that she was almost always open to intuitive messages and they were always correct. Many psychics I have known aren't quite so accurate nor do they keep their psychic switch "on" all of the time. Abby does ignore her psychic phone sometimes, usually to her detriment. She also does drift into interpretations of what she "sees" that often aren't exactly on the money. But this is exactly what psychic intuitives do. They "see" something and then try to put it into a context that they are familiar with. Sometimes, that context isn't the same as the one the person they are reading for has.

    Nevertheless, Abby Cooper, Psychic Eye, is a fast-paced read, full of excitement, and the wonder of how Abby's psychic messages will prove true as the story unfolds. I can't wait for the next installment in the series.

Reviews of other titles in this series

Abby Cooper, Psychic Eye, 1
Better Read Than Dead, 2
A Vision of Murder, 3
Killer Insight, 4
Death Perception, 6
Vision Impossible, 9
Lethal Outlook, 10
Deadly Forecast, 11
Fatal Fortune, 12
Sense of Deception, 13 [review 1] [review 2]
A Grave Prediction, 14