Phantom Instinct by Meg Gardiner

[lilysreviews]

Blurb: When your own eyes betray you, who can you trust?

At the door, the harsh-eyed man and woman surveyed the room in slow tandem, like twin Terminators. Drew leaned on the bar, rattling the ice in his glass. Harper took the Cuervo Gold from the shelf. The first sound was a muffled pop. The man and woman with the gunslinger eyes turned toward the high roller’s booth. Harper’s skin prickled. A second report hammered beneath the drumbeat. It was unmistakable, a noise she knew from the firing range and a thousand TV shows, a sound it seemed she had been expecting all her life: gunfire.

In Edgar Award-winning author Meg Gardiner’s new stand-alone thriller, an injured cop and an ex-thief hunt down a killer nobody else believes exists.

When shots ring out in a crowded L.A. club, bartender Harper Flynn watches helplessly as her boyfriend, Drew, is gunned down in the crossfire. Then somebody throws a Molotov cocktail and the club is quickly engulfed in flames. L.A. Sheriff’s detective Aiden Garrison sees a gunman in a hoodie and gas mask taking aim at Harper, but before he can help her, a wall collapses, bringing the building down and badly injuring him.

A year later, Harper is trying to rebuild her life. She has quit her job and gone back to college. Meanwhile, the investigation into the shootout has been closed. The two gunmen were killed when the building collapsed.

Certain that a third gunman escaped and is targeting the survivors, Harper enlists the help of Aiden Garrison, the only person willing to listen. But the traumatic brain injury he suffered has cut his career short and left him with Fregoli Syndrome, a rare type of face blindness that causes the delusion that random people are actually a single person changing disguises.

As Harper and Aiden delve into the case, Harper realizes that her presence during the attack was no coincidence—and that her only ally is unstable, mistrustful of her, and seeing the same enemy everywhere he looks.

Review: I looked forward to reading this book (received from publisher for review) as I liked the premise and I had read about Ms. Gardiner before, but had not yet read any of her books.

I enjoyed reading Phantom Instinct very much. It was fast paced, great characters, enough twists and turns to satisfy my reading tastes, and a good plot.

I liked seeing how the characters grew and changed as the story unfolded. I liked seeing how each character dealt with the different issues that cropped up. The themes were something else I enjoyed - who to trust, who to turn to, how far to go, instinct - good or bad.

Great read and I look forward to reading more of Ms. Gardiner's books.

(Cover image and blurb (c)Meg Gardiner)