I have just finished reading Ted Dekker's 2008 Thriller Adam. The story is about an extremely cunning serial killer dubbed Eve who murders his victims by infecting them with a form of meningitis. His ritual is to kill a young woman every month on the new moon. Thus far he has taken 16 lives. The lead FBI profiler on the case, David Clark, much like a method actor, infuses every bit of himself into trying to develop the mind of the killer. This skill makes him very successful in his work, but led his wife Heather to divorce him. New to the case is FBI pathologist Lori Ames, who meshes very well with David both personally and professionally. Their bond is strengthened when David gets close to Eve and takes a bullet to the head. Though clinically dead for nearly an hour, Lori brings him back to life. However, David has lost all memories of his face-to-face encounter with Eve. A notably weak aspect of this story concerns the notion of near death experiences (NDEs). Lori and David come up with the notion that if David can be killed clinically, his lost memories from his first death can be reawakened. So they go through this bit of hocum, not just once, but twice. Lori injects David with some stuff to kill him, gives him time to explore his mind in his NDE state, and then revives him in the nick of time. The chase and encounter with the serial killer was really kind of standard fare for Dekker, wherein he relied on vehicles that he has used before. This time there was a bit of a twist involving demonic possession and who the character of Lori really was. However, what elevated this work to a higher plain was the interspersing of a nine-part article from a (fictitious) magazine that provided the back story of the serial killer and his tragic life. It was written with such feeling and realism that it really helped you understand the mind of the antagonist (and I should add that I thought this was a real set of articles until I got further into the book). This amounted to a novel bit of inspiration that was my favorite aspect of this work.
