The Knight by Steven James - MY REVIEW

“Everything Matters.” (p. 321)

Steven James’ novel, The Knight, makes every word, every grammatical mark upon the page matter a great deal. Reading his novel takes you into another time and place entirely and you read with such urgency that you often have to stop and take a deep breath. The word thriller could be defined by Steven James’ writing. He makes the thrills have chills! He is EXCELLENT!!!

I have just been introduced to Steven James’ Patrick Bowers series, and I am immensely satisfied!! The dialogue in this story was tight, intense and so brisk that the pages fairly fanned my face as I was reading. Every thought, every implied thought is taut and packed with layered meanings. Everything matters in this book. You don’t want to miss anything! There were times I literally pressed my fist to my mouth to keep from crying out! (that scene in the helicopter – oh my word!!) The action was so rapid, the bad guy so incredibly evil and the race to catch him so frantic that every muscle in my body was coiled like a spring!

I guess the thrill of being scared out of my mind is still alive and well, because I am totally hooked on Steven James! TOTALLY!! The Knight made me forget time, place and reason…I was completely immersed in story.

Now, Patrick Bowers is a tragic character. I loved his brilliant mind, the way he loves his step-daughter, his dedication to justice…but the poor man needs to take a break. Take a vacation. Get grounded. But that won’t happen. The only light in his world seemed to blink out when he lost the only person he’d ever loved enough to share his heart with. However, the glimmer of faith left behind has a difficult time taking hold in Pat Bower’s life because he is constantly trying to stay one step ahead of a psychopath. Actually, the psychopath was always ten steps ahead of everyone…and CREEPY!! Great day in the morning, he was the definition of creepy!

All I can say is…you won’t find a thriller with more thrills, a novel with more action, a crime story with more twist and turns, characters with more heart and sheer grit than those written upon the pages of The Knight. And you better bet I’m going home tonight in a frantic search to see if I can find the other Steven James novel I know I have somewhere in my mountain of books. I am totally hooked! There’s not a lot of faith to be found among the pages, but for good, clean, heart-pounding entertainment…it gets no better than Steven James!! Did I tell you, I’m hooked? Totally!!

Available August 2009 at your favorite bookseller from Revell, a division of Baker Publishing Group.

MORE ABOUT THE BOOK: (from the publisher)

Steven James is one of the nation’s most innovative storytellers—with a Master of Arts in Storytelling degree to prove it. For the past decade, he has been crafting compelling and evocative stories that pull readers into the thick of his brilliant, mind-bending plots, and his latest creative endeavor is no different: The Knight, the third installment in his bestselling series of thrillers, is full of the chilling twists and adrenaline-laced action that readers have come to expect from James.

The Knight picks up in The Bowers Files series, starring FBI criminologist Patrick Bowers, who is assigned to tracking the country’s most dangerous killers. But when he is called to his most disturbing crime scene yet, Bowers begins to realize that this criminal mastermind has actually been tracking him.

To get to the bottom of this cold-blooded case, Bowers uses his cutting-edge investigative techniques to decipher the evidence and discovers that the murderer has been using an ancient manuscript as a blueprint for his crimes. This sends Bowers on a race against time to stop the killer before he takes his next victim in another grisly crime.

But even as he is working to crack the clues of this bloody trail, Bowers finds himself stumped by another matter: An old murder case haunts him, causing him to question himself and wonder which is more important—truth or justice. The answer might set a killer free or change Bowers into a criminal himself.

Keeping readers guessing until the very end, James has earned rave reviews from the likes of Publishers Weekly, which called his thrillers “a wild ride with a shocking conclusion.” The Knight offers readers more of the same, as the satisfying follow-up to his previous bestselling psychological thrillers in The Bowers Files series, The Pawn and The Rook.