Review: Eyes to See (Jeremiah Hunt, #1)

Author: Joseph Nassise
Series: Jeremiah Hunt, #1
Published: October 11th 2011
Publisher: Tor
Source: Publisher for review
Buy: The Book Depository


There’s nothing I love more than dark, gritty urban fantasy, and man, does Joseph Nassise know how to write it! I can’t even remember the last time I enjoyed UF this much.

A man’s daughter disappears right from under his nose. He spends the next few years desperately looking for her, losing his wife and his job in the process. As the years go by and his search remains without results, his methods become increasingly desperate. Left with no other options, he performs an arcane ritual which takes away his eyesight, but gives him the ability to see the spirit world. He occasionally assists the police with some particularly difficult investigations in exchange for information about his daughter’s case.

Parents experience a unique kind of fear. It is at once more visceral and more paralyzing than any other fear, a cold, clammy hand that squeezes your heart until your very blood starts to drip from between its fingers. It invades your mind like an alien presence, disrupts your thought process and ratchets your emotions right of the scale, until you can’t possibly think straight and every second is an eternity, an eternity where all you can do is think about all of the terrible things that could have happened to your precious child.

Jeremiah Hunt is a character of unusual complexity. To a reader, the pain Hunt feels over losing his daughter is far more terrifying than any ghost, fetch, witch or beserker he comes across. This is where Nassise truly impressed me. Every few chapters we’d get to jump back to those days around Elizabeth’s disappearance and see Hunt as he was then: a successful Harvard scholar with a nice house and a beautiful wife. Making the jump back to current events and Hunt as he is now was shocking every time, especially at the beginning, before the entire process was revealed. Of course, as the reader is offered more chapters about Hunt’s increasingly desperate search, his choices become more clear and understandable, but never easier to handle.

I really liked Hunt’s only two allies (if you don’t count Whisper and Scream, his ghostly assistants), Denise Clearwater and Dmitri. They are exactly the kind of people someone like Hunt needs: used to not asking a lot of questions and unwilling to answer more than strictly necessary, but willing to make sacrifices for a good enough cause. And if they do seem unusually loyal for relatively new acquaintances, it's because they aren't really loyal to Hunt himself, but to the Gifted community as a whole.

Readers who enjoy romance above all else might find themselves a bit disappointed, though. Hunt isn’t exactly interested in women, and although there’s some real attraction between him and Denise Clearwater, he is simply to obsessed with his search for Elizabeth to act on it, or even to give it much thought.

Eyes to See doesn’t end with a cliffhange but enough things were left open to make me eager to read the sequel, King of the Dead, as soon as I can. Luckily (and thanks to the lovely people at Tor), I have it right here. To conclude, I’ll just quote Seanan McGuire straight from the cover: “Make time for this one.”