Look Behind You by Iris and Roy Johansen

Look Behind You is a novel written by Iris and Roy Johansen. The story follows a woman in her mid-twenties named Kendra Michaels. She works as a music therapist in San Diego, however she used to work for the FBI. So she is greatly surprised when FBI agents show up at her workplace needing help on a case despite her not working there for years. The case is about a series of murders happening in the San Diego area in the past few weeks. They need her help because of her extraordinary observation skills due to being blind for the first twenty years of her life. She reluctantly says yes, initially only to taking a look at the scene, but she soon becomes roped into the entire investigation process. As she works with a team of other highly-skilled FBI agents, it becomes increasingly obvious that the killings have been going on for a lot longer than they originally thought, and that the killer’s plan may have been years in the making.

Look Behind You has a lot of great qualities that kept me interested. For one, the novel starts with a prologue of the killer narrating his thoughts as he decides how to execute his next kill. I’m happy the authors thought to include this part because it captivated my attention right away. I noticed that a lot of information about the past lives of the characters was left unexplained until later in the book. This initially made it hard to understand, but it was satisfying when I was finally able to piece things together. With a book of this genre, I thought it might be boring to read because I would be able to guess the plot, but this was not the case. The novel had all sorts of unexpected twists that I had no idea would happen.

This book had a lot of good things about it, but there were a few things I disliked about the story. One thing I noticed was that some parts seemed like they were covered way too fast, and other parts I thought went on for longer than they should have. For example, they did not spend a lot of writing on details about the characters' lives, which I think is important for the reader to get a good visual, but they spent a lot of time on scenes that didn’t seem to be relevant to what was happening. Another thing I wished would have been different was that the book was in third person. Normally I don’t mind this, but for this writing style, I think it ended up making the story more confusing and hard to follow. My last complaint is that there were a lot of characters that were important to the plot, and I found myself having to go back in the book to remember who they were. It was frustrating because I think the authors should have spent more time on the introduction of the characters than they did.

Overall, I did like this book and its plot, but I don’t think it was perfect, just because there were a few things the authors did that made me as a reader confused and slightly annoyed at times.

- Lena