HUNGRY HEARTS AND DARK SOULS: JAKE HINKSON'S YOU WILL NEVER SEE ME

Jake Hinkson immediately grabs us with the set-up in his latest, You Will Never See Me. Alice, Hardesty, a married academic, gets pulled into an alley and is assaulted, as she leaves her lover's apartment. She escapes and leaves him bleeding. When she returns with the man she was sleeping with, the attacker and any signs of the crime are gone. She goes home, gets rid of her clothes, and decides to keep quiet as not to reveal her indiscretions. She didn't know private detective Owen Pall was hired by the assailants wife, assuming his nights out were due to cheating, to surveil him. He has all of the attack on tape and tries to blackmail both victim and victimizer.

However, we later learn more is going on. Another killer enters the picture and well as some mobsters and things get bloody. It is difficult to go further without giving away some of the tasy twists and turns. However, this more about character than plot. The dilemma each person finds themselves in, forces them to face their failings. It is that power to take that long hard look in the mirror and make some decisions in life that prove their best chance for salvation if not escape.

Hinkson understands his characters no matter how dark. The serial killers come off more like pathetic, if dangerous, men than monsters, due to the way the book taps into the banality of their evil. While we side with Alice over Owen, we get to learn where each comes from and their behavior. Jake has cited Flannery O'Connor as an influence on his work and we see it in these messy lives often ruled by the worst of instincts.

Those lives and the book's understanding of them makes for great storytelling in You Will Never See Me. It's what keeps us wondering where the story will go and buying what does happen. Morality has always been a strong thread through Jakle Hinkson's work and here he looks at the the people we want to be and who we actually are, finding more darkness than light in the schism.