Customer Reviews

Grave Instinct (Jessica Coran Novels)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Rather than harm his wife and child, Dr. Grant Kenyon and his alter ego "Phillip" moved out of his home in New Jersey and trolled I-95 for females. Once Grant snatched the innocent young woman, Phillip would take over and surgically cut the brain out and eat it. He believes that eating fresh human brains will increase his awareness and achieve cosmic consciousness. Grant is modeling his behavior after Daryl Thomas Chockil "The New Jersey Ghoul" who dug up the bodies of dead children in 1990 and ate a part of their brain.

He was incarcerated in a hospital for the mentally insane but has gotten out a month before the skull-digger started killing his victims. The FBI immediately focus their attention on Daryl but medical examiner Dr. Jessica Coran thinks the real killer is setting up The New Jersey Ghoul to take the fall. She persuades her superiors to look for someone who keeps logging on to Daniel's website and after a ton of digging, they find a likely suspect but Jessica almost gets herself killed when she tries to take him in.

Robert W. Walker can always be counted on to create an exciting crime thriller with a villain that readers love to hate. Told from the point of view of the killer, the audience learns that the character suffers from multiple personality disorder but he is so evil, he illicits no sympathy. The novel is also told from the protagonist's point of view and readers sympathize with her feelings of impotence and frustration as she tries to convince her superiors to go after the right person, not the easiest one to blame.

Harriet Klausner

Grave Instinct is a huge roller-coaster ride from start to finish. It begins at lightning speed and just gets faster from there. Those who can't follow Walker's complex sentences need to go back to school. His style is similar to Martin Cruz Smith -- Gorky Park. He's closer to Faulkner than to Hemmingway. So you don't find a lotta easy sentences and you can't go out for a snack until the scene is finished, but the payoff is amazing. My favorite author and I can't wait to jump into his Absolute Instinct and his new series City for Ransom.

I eagerly awaited the release of this in paper back having read all previous Instinct books! The previous books were so well researched, Jessica was smart, savy and knew her proceedure inside out. Nothing slipped past her and she outsmarted everyone!

This book she is like a rookie patrolman. It's like someone else wrote this book and just filled it with shock value murder scenes.

Oh Mr. Walker, this is such a disappointment!

Scary, fun, keeps you guessing until the end. I could not put it down. BONE CHILLING FUN!! CONGRATS Rob Walker! Your best yet. A MUST READ!

I know there seems to be a lot of fair reviews on this book, but it didn't really seem all that great to me. My biggest complaint overall was the grammatical errors, which is a pet peeve of mine and I kept running into them on just about every page. It made me wonder who exactly did the editing, because they obviously weren't doing their job. The writing just also seemed kind of week, also, although the story was interesting, I feel like the quality of writing brought it down.

This is a remarkable, fun, scary forensics forray and a forray into the madness not only of one maniac but many, and the madness of our law enforcement systems, especially the prison system which allows a crazoid like Manson to deliver his rantings on his website to potentially "poison" young minds. This is cutting edge stuff and recalls to mind themes Walker wrote about in his first Edge book, Cutting Edge, in which it is noted anyone with a PC or a Mac today can and does often set him or herself up as a demi-god or a conduit from God. Walker always deals with complex issues, and perhaps this is why his readers are so loyal to him. They know with each of his books they will get into meaty issues, and this is no soap opera as with so many other forensics titles that fall far more into the category of romance or as i said soap opera. I liken Walker's books to a TV drama that you CAN'T sleep or blink through or step away to make a sandwich, or drop the ball, because everything in the drama matters. There are surprises on every page. There is action on every page. As for the person calling herself traffic cop...for a traffic cop to be telling Mr. Walker he does not know anything about forensics, well that is crazy, isn't it?? Suffice to say that this book is a TEN. And don't miss FleshWar, and Mr. Walker's Geoffrey Caine novels on Fiction Wise now, and the return of the Chicago ME Dean Grant on Fiction Wise as well. But most of all don't miss his City for Ransom.

The story was typically spun with Walker's usual aplomb and finess. The characters progresses futher along that usual and you are left to wonder whether Jessica really is, after all this time, going to give it up. I hope not. But Walker may be tiring of the character for a while at least. I have all the books of the series and have read them more than once. This tale is one of my favorites>

I agree with all of the previous negative comments, and I won't repeat points they made.

I have never read this author before, but picked up this book at the library based on numerous plaudits on the (paperback) book. Based on this one, I won't bother to read any others. I don't write many reviews, but I was moved to write this one just to warn others away.

First, I will say that the basic premise of the book was intriguing and sufficiently interesting that I read it completely through. Maybe my frustration comes from the fact that the story development was handled SO poorly. (It coulda been a contender)

The book is riddled with
-- errors, like "Angora" [not Angola ??] Prison, "Pittsburgh Pennsylvania University" [not the University of Pittsburgh] Steps leading to a house are made out of cypress-- when a few pages earlier, they were made of cedar. Supposedly the bobbing movement of the room shown on a video help the good guys to figure out that it is on a boat. But the camera and room are fixed in position on the same boat, so there would be NO apparent movement in the video.
--and--
-- hackneyed or unrealistic plot devices Split personality is a very rare condition used far too often in fiction, so perhaps I shouldn't complain. But, eating fresh brains is so compelling that even police pick up the habit quickly ?? We're told that a hurricane is hitting to the south, close enough that local helicopters have been sent down for rescue work. But around here, the air and water are so calm that the fog is inpenetrable ?

I don't understand why there are so many unconnected vignettes of unknown people reading mostly technical material about brain anatomy on web sites. It comes across to me as if some research assistant had taken the trouble to copy that technical information down, and the author had to fit it in SOMEWHERE.

Enough. I fear that I have already devoted more brain energy to this book than it deserves.

I couldn't get going on this book. It was completely unrealistic. The police procedure was totally incorrect; in addition to the glaring inconsistencies between proper FBI procedure and what the author tried to get the reader to believe. As a result, I was constantly turned off by the book. I found my attention wandering every time that I came across a mistake in procedure.
Walker's portrayal of a female Law Enforcement Officer was much too trite and Hollywood. I found myself rolling my eyes and shaking my head at passages involving the Duval County Sheriff. It was almost as if he was writing his characters with specific actors and actresses in mind, instead of real people doing real jobs.
My advice? Stop dreaming of Hollywood, start doing some procedural study, and for pete's sake...research the REAL people that do the real jobs in your books.

This is the first of his I have read' will NOT go back and read the previous ones. He seems to revel in the grotesque torture scenes, and the characters never make me empathize with them. Cornwell and Reichs he is NOT!!