T. J. MacGREGOR The Seventh Sense

T. J. MacGREGOR – The Seventh Sense. Kensington, hardcover, 1999. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 1999 [?]. Pinnacle, paperback, March 2000.

    When author Trish MacGregor is not writing mysteries, she’s busy doing books on astrology, the interpretation of dreams, love spells and charms, and the tarot. Which goes a long way in explaining why many of her recent books of crime fiction have more than a hint of the supernatural or paranormal in them as well.

    (She seems to have abandoned her novels in the Quin St. James/Mike McCleary series, of which there were ten, and since I haven’t read any of them, I can’t tell you how much they depended on psychic phenomena in terms of plot material, nor what the books she’s written as Alison Drake are like. Follow the link above for a list of all her books.)

    But picking this one up to read, I have to tell you, is like picking up a downed electrical wire and not being able to let go. In the opening scene an up-and-coming attorney, infuriated at not being able to land a client, succumbs to the worst case of road rage that you’ll ever read, and if you can put the book down right then and there and not continue, you’re a stronger person than I, by far.

    The fatal victims of this deliberate attack are the husband and unborn child of (guess what) an FBI agent on maternity leave, Charlie Calloway, who can’t let the killer just walk away, and she doesn’t. Is it justice she’s looking for, or simply revenge?

    This a tough story, enhanced to near incandescent level by Charlie’s newly developed seventh sense. She’d always worked well on hunches; when she died for a few minutes after the accident, her powers became even more. On page 87, her friend Rain is explaining it all to her:

T. J. MacGREGOR The Seventh Sense

    “Clairvoyance, clairsentience, clairaudience, medical intuition … they’re all part of the sixth sense.” She touched her index finger to a spot between her eyes. “They come from here. The sixth energy level. But I think that what dying awakes in people is a seventh sense. ” She touched her hand to the top of her skull. “Your seventh sense center is blown wide open.”

    “I don’t understand.”

    Rain hesitated before she spoke. “It’s not just a psychic faculty. It’s almost like your entire being opens up to the invisible world that runs just beneath the surface of consciousness. You open to the collective mind, to a new sense of space and time. The seventh sense is about learning to use your consciousness in new ways, and synchronicities play a part in all of it.”

    I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy, so I can go along with this, but if truth be told, this would be one heck of a suspense thriller, even without the inclusion of the “new consciousness.”

    Occasionally over the top, as if you haven’t been able to tell by now, this is a wild, careening trip into the deep utter blackness that emotions (and their aftermath) can produce. Not for everyone’s taste, I don’t imagine, but while it lasts, it’s quite a ride.

— September 2003



[UPDATE] 02-01-12.   From the author’s website, some more information about her various series and characters: Quin St. James and Mike McCleary are two private detectives (male and female) who “plied their trade in the dark underbelly of Miami in the late 1980s.”

    Of the Alison Drake books (four of them), she says “the most significant aspect in those books was the creation of Tango Key, an island 12 miles west of Key West, where the anomalous geography is as mysterious as the island’s legends and lore of mermaids, UFOs, converging ley lines, ghosts and hauntings.”

    Tango Key was also used as a setting in the author’s five book Mira Morales series.