I have to admire someone who starts their story with "It was a dark and stormy night . . . " and then veers off into something so weird it has to be either a dream or some kind of alternate reality.  With lots of knives.  It’ll be interesting to see where this goes.

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"Strangers in the Brain" is the story of Detective Burleigh, who participates in an experimental form of detective work—he uses a device called the Flytrap to enter the mind of a criminal and extract where he’s hidden the bodies of the people he’s murdered.

While the premise is similar to the Jennifer Lopez movie "The Cell," complete with a psychotic dreamscape inside the killer’s mind, the story stands on it’s own merits.  The author creates an excellent narrative voice for Burleigh, one that’s reminiscent of tough detectives like Humphrey Bogart would play, only with a modern sensibility.  The writing evokes the same kind of atmospheric tension, without seeming old-fashioned.

This combination of detective serial with science-fiction undertones works, as the story doesn’t concentrate on the Flytrap, it returns Burleigh to his every-day life—where it becomes increasingly mysterious, as he starts having hallucinations.  I started out this review with a summary of events, but I took that out—I think readers will enjoy the suspense of each chapter building on each other, and the clues along the way, without any spoilers on my part.

Burleigh’s distinctive narrative voice and the gritty tension of a detective crime novel make this an absorbing read, to the point that I went through all five sections of the novel thus far this morning.  The suspense will surely have me coming back for more.  Not only does Burleigh have to deal with the every day crimes his detective job requires, but now there’s something wrong with his mind—sooner or later he’s going to have to return to Flytech, the company that created the Flytrap.  I want to know what’s going on—does the machine have unexpected side-effects?  Is Burleigh still trapped inside, like the Matrix? Did Flytech implant something inside him for their own studies?

Only time will tell.  The solution to the mystery will be the deciding factor in my opinion of this story—if it’s novel and illuminating, I’ll likely be rating this at 4.5 or 5 stars in the future.  So long as the story doesn’t devolve and lose cohesion, turning into a "Matrix: Reloaded" or worse, "Vanilla Sky," I’ll be following this one closely to see what happens next.

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