Book review - Reviver by Seth Patrick: More thriller than supernatural

I have to start by saying that this isn’t the sort of book I’d normally read.  Supernatural themes are not usually my thing at all and when I first picked up the book, I was pretty sure that it would go in to the “won’t read pile”.  I decided to skim through the first couple of pages and was genuinely hooked. 

 

So…Revivers are people with powers that allow them to speak to the recently deceased.  The protagonist Jonah Miller is a Reviver with deep sensitivity for the dead and one of the best in the business, working for the Forensic Revival Service.  The FRS get to the dead as soon after death as possible, helping the dead/victim give investigators information about how they died.

There are multiple plot lines, starting with Miller believing that he is sensing some kind of spiritual force that’s not from the dead person he’s reviving.  Alongside this, Daniel Harker, the journalist who brought Revival to the public’s attention is murdered.  Despite the debilitating impact of the revivals he is doing, Miller joins Harker’s daughter Annabel to find out why her father was murdered, but as they investigate, they slowly find a long hidden danger which….well, let’s not give too much away at this point.

Although I’ve read a lot of good books this year, I found this one grabbed me straight away, despite me being uninterested in the supernatural.  I’d describe Reviver as a thriller, rather than a supernatural novel and whilst I found it a little hard to buy into the “Unity” bit, it’s very well written.  There was plenty in the book to keep me engaged and continue turning the pages until I got to the end.  I liked Miller as a character and there were interesting touches like the idea of feeling “chill”, which gave the right level of depth and authenticity to the book. 

I hope this is the start of a series as I think this has got legs, but I’d prefer a future novel to use revival as a part of mainstream criminal investigation, rather than the underlying supernatural theme of this novel.  

Finally, although I’m a bit of a technophobe, I downloaded the “Blippar” app, which is free, and used it to unlock additional information about the book by hovering my phone over the book cover.  It’s great fun and you can use it on the physical book cover, a picture of the book cover on a computer screen or even on an advertising poster.  An interesting little extra for a really good book.

Romancrimeblogger