Adam – Ted Dekker

Adam by Ted Dekker
Also by this author: The Promise, The Drummer Boy, Sinner, Green, The Dream Traveler's Quest, Into the Book of Light, The Curse of Shadownman, The Garden and the Serpent, The Final Judgment, Millie Maven and the Bronze Medallion
Published by Center Street on April 2008
Genres: Fiction, Thriller, Suspense
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It takes an obsessive mind to know one. And Daniel Clark knows the elusive killer he's been stalking.

He's devoted every waking minute as a profiler to find the serial killer known only as Eve. He's pored over the crime scenes of sixteen young women who died mysterious deaths, all in underground basements or caverns. He's delved into the killer's head and puzzled over the twisted religious overtones of the killings.

What Daniel can't possibly know is that he will be Eve's next victim. He will be the killer's first Adam. After sixteen hopeless months, the case takes a drastic turn on a very dark night when Daniel is shot and left for dead.

Resuscitated after twenty minutes of clinical death, Daniel finds himself haunted by the experience. He knows he's seen the killer's face, but the trauma of dying has obscured the memory and left him with crushing panic attacks. Nothing--not even desperate, dangerous attempts to re-experience his own death--seems to bring him closer to finding the killer.

This isn’t your typical serial killer novel. That’s because Eve isn’t your typical serial killer. He kills his victims on the new moon. Leaves their body ravaged by some undetermined form of meningitis. Toys with the cops trying to catch him. Always five steps ahead. Always.

FBI behavioral psychologist Daniel Clark has sacrificed the last year of his life in the attempt to stop Eve. Life meaning any free time, his marriage, perhaps even his sanity. But on this day, life means life. It’s supposed to be a good thing when you find the victim still alive, but on this day it was only a trap. A trap that ended with Daniel Clark dead as Eve put a bullet in his head and took back his prize.

But being dead is a funny thing. Sometimes you come back. But though Daniel Clark has his life again, he has no memory of the incident. His attempts to reengage that memory become frenzied when Eve selects Daniel’s ex-wife as the next victim. The more Daniel learns about the case, the less he knows for sure. The forces he’s chasing go far beyond some simple serial killer and end in something even more evil. Before it’s all over, he will understand all too intimately that his fight is not against flesh and blood but against the very face of hell.

This storyline is juxtaposed with a series of news articles written in retrospect about the killer, detailing his terrifying past and his descent into possession. It is these sections that really shine and Dekker brings a journalistic flair to suspense and integrates the technique flawlessly into the story.

Chilling. Powerful. Horrific. Magnificent. Page-turning. Disturbing. Thrilling. Adam is one of those books that grabs you and just doesn’t let go.

Ted Dekker has made waves in the book industry ever since “going mainstream” with ABA publisher Hachette in 2009’s BoneMan’s Daughters. Adam was originally released by Dekker’s CBA publisher Thomas Nelson in 2008 but Hachette bought the rights to it (as well as Thr3e) in order to create a new mass market edition, which is the edition I am reviewing. Only minor changes exist between the 2010 Hachette edition and the 2008 Thomas Nelson original.

Dekker is probably best known for his fantasy series called the Circle, but he’s made a big name for himself in the thriller market as well. Introducing these mass market copies of some of his older thrillers into the general populace is sure to bring him a whole new audience – which is great, because Adam is a story that needs to be told.

Dekker paints possession in a raw and gritty light, relying on actual possession stories to pen his account. But it is the story of the heart that matters most. What happens when an atheistic psychologist tracks down a tormented killer possessed by a demon? What happens when he takes on an evil greater than anything else he believes in? Adam is that story.

Another of Dekker’s explorations into Truth, Adam reminds us that evil is all around us, more powerful than we can imagine. And that should scare the hell out of us, quite literally – But ultimately he points to the light and the grace of One greater than that evil – Jesus the Christ.