Invisible by James Patterson and David Ellis

FBI research analyst Emmy Dockery, the narrator for most of James Patterson and David Ellis’s Invisible, is convinced that there is something connecting a series of deadly fires going on around the country. Her sister Marta died in one of these blazes, and Emmy thinks foul play was involved due to a few unusual things she noticed at the scene of that particular fire. But is she simply seeing the work of a serial killer because her sister’s death has put her too close to the case? Is her boss at the FBI, Julius Dickinson, right in thinking that Emmy’s mental health is in need of help before she can return to work?

Invisible was hard for me to get into at first due to a number of stock characters. There were also just some puzzling characters, such as an FBI agent who goes by the nickname Books. He has left the Bureau at the beginning of Invisible and is running a bookstore but is asked to rejoin the FBI for this case. Strangely, Books never seems to think about his bookstore again. Maybe he had a good contingency plan in case of just such a situation arose. This book, however, is really more about the plot and less about the characters. Once the plot picked up I found myself getting more into the novel. While the characters are not that memorable, the many plot twists and surprises kept me guessing even close to the end of Invisible.

John