KATHERINE KURTZ & DEBORAH TURNER HARRIS: “The Adept” series.

    “The first of five novels in a series featuring Sir Adam Sinclair, ‘more than a doctor, more than a detective…’ He’s a psychic sleuth, member of an ancient order of white magicians belonging to the order of Templar Knights who are always on the alert to threats to members of their order from the ‘Dark Roads where the black magicians travel.’”

   Thus began my review of The Adept (Ace, 1991) when I read it back in 1998. I concluded by saying that I liked the first novel in the series well enough – in spite of a certain excessive fondness by the authors for sartorial details arid interior decoration – to go on to the second novel.

   And there the matter lay, until, one gloomy day in late December of 2007 or early January of 2008 I happened upon the unread succeeding four novels, started number two in the series.

   Almost without realizing it, found myself launched on a whirlwind tour of The Adept, Book Two: The Lodge of the Lynx (Ace, 1992), Book Three: The Templar Treasure (Ace, 1993), Dagger Magic (Ace, 1996), and Death of an Adept (Ace, 1997).

   The excessive interest in details of clothing and setting diminished somewhat, and the plots continued to put Sir Adam and his two closest Associates, Peregrine Lovat, a talented painter of portraits, especially sensitive to psychic layers in his subjects, and DCI Noel Mcleod, a gifted medium, and other members of their circle, as well as the general public, at great risk of losing their immortal souls in the never-ending battles with powerful adepts of the dark arts.

   In the final novel, Sir Adam is happily married, and his circle’s most notorious foe, dark adept Francis Raeburn, has finally been destroyed, ripped to shreds by one of the demons he had invoked.

   And yet, as Sir Adam and his wife drive off in their classic Bentley, they are observed by a man driving a car with a single passenger, a woman “with heavily bandaged hands, whose painted lips curled in studied malice as the Bentley slipped away into traffic.”

   A rather curious way to conclude the series, which makes me wonder if another novel was planned but not published. Or just a way of reminding the reader that the battle against evil never ends.