The Copycat Who Built His Murders Around Kendra Michaels' Greatest Hits

The second Kendra Michaels novel from mother-and-son co-authors Iris and Roy Johansen opens on what looks like a horrific accident: a multi-car pile-up on San Diego's historic Cabrillo Bridge, the kind of scene that draws a fire crew and a few news cameras and gets logged as a bad day on the road. Kendra arrives, takes one look at the wreckage, and knows it was murder - and gets to the police before the scene gets cleaned away. By the next chapter the FBI has the case, and they have sent Adam Lynch to bring Kendra in as a consultant. By the chapter after that, the murders have started copying her.

Before getting any further: the setup the whole series rests on. Kendra Michaels was born blind, was blind into her twenties, and learned the world entirely through hearing, smell, touch, and a kind of pattern recognition most sighted people never have to develop. An experimental surgical procedure restored her sight as an adult, but the years of compensatory perception didn't go anywhere when the visual cortex came online - they sit on top of normal sight now, which is how she ends up noticing what trained agents at a crime scene miss. Her day job is music therapy. The consulting work is the part of her life she keeps trying not to get pulled back into. She gets pulled back in anyway.

The Cabrillo Bridge, and the Pattern That Emerges

The traffic case turns out to have four victims and a single, very deliberate killer behind it. The FBI hands it over to Adam Lynch - ex-Bureau, now working freelance, and the federal go-between who keeps recruiting Kendra into cases she would rather decline. As Lynch and Kendra work the bridge killings, more bodies start coming in around them, and the pattern is the thing that lifts this book past a generic copycat thriller. The new murders are not random; each one recreates a different case from Kendra's own past consulting work, including the cases she helped close against Eric Colby, the serial killer who anchored the first novel, Close Your Eyes. Somebody is staging a retrospective of Kendra Michaels' greatest hits, in bodies.

The colder turn is that this is not just an admirer copying from a distance. Almost every new victim has a personal or professional connection to Kendra herself - people she has worked with, treated, or known. The killer is not building a tribute. He is closing the circle around her one familiar face at a time, and the book spends its middle act tightening that noose while Kendra realizes the people she cares about are essentially a target list.

What Works

The most interesting thing the series has is Kendra's perception itself, and the Johansens use it well here. The set-piece deductions - Kendra walking onto a scene and reconstructing what happened from a smell, a sound the others tuned out, a posture that didn't match the story the body was telling - deliver the Sherlock-style payoff the premise promises. There is also a real attempt to render the strangeness of acquired sight: Kendra still defaults to her older senses for fine-grained reading, and visual input sometimes overwhelms rather than clarifies. It is not always subtle, but it gives her interiority more texture than the standard genius-investigator template.

The book is also professionally paced. The Johansens know how to structure a commercial thriller; the chapters end where they need to end, the set pieces (the bridge, the ambushes, the inevitable confrontation with the killer) are constructed cleanly, and the San Diego setting is used as a location rather than wallpaper. As a piece of competent suspense engineering, it works.

Where It Struggles

The reservations are the usual ones for this corner of the genre, and they are real. The Adam Lynch dynamic is the obligatory will-they-won't-they that series like this seem contractually required to carry, and it lands as banter-by-the-numbers rather than chemistry. The deductive leaps occasionally outrun what the scene has actually shown the reader, which is the price of any Sherlock-format protagonist. Secondary characters mostly exist to be in danger and not much else.

The deeper structural reservation is that the copycat-of-my-past-cases conceit, which is the whole engine of the book, comes loaded with a series-internal pull: a meaningful share of its weight depends on book one's killer. If you have not read Close Your Eyes, the Colby callbacks land as backstory rather than as the gut-punch they are clearly meant to be. The book mostly works as a standalone, but it is unmistakably book two doing book-two things.

Who It's For

This is well-made commercial thriller with a premise sharper than most of its peers and an execution that hits its marks without elevating past them. The 4.0 is for clean pacing, the Sherlock-style reveals when Kendra is on a scene, and a copycat structure that gives the book actual stakes for the protagonist rather than just for strangers. If you came for innovation, this isn't it. If you came for a six-hour plane book with a heroine you want to keep reading, it does the job.

Rating: 4.0/5 ⭐

Perfect for: Iris Johansen readers, fans of Sherlock-style deductive protagonists, anyone who likes copycat-killer thrillers where the past cases come back personal, plane-and-beach commercial suspense.

Skip if: You need innovation rather than competent execution, formulaic federal-agent romance subplots are a dealbreaker, or starting a series mid-stride without reading _Close Your Eyes first would frustrate you._