I’ve been reading The Unseen by T.L Hines. This is the story of Lucas, who lives in uninhabited areas of public buildings and spends most of his time watching people. You will be surprised to hear that he is a sympathetic character.

Lucas encounters others like him, and gets caught up in a major crime wave, plus high-level international spying, and if you’re a fan of thrillers and spy novels, you’ll like this book for the action and the cleverly twisted plot that supports that action. But there’s more to it than that. There’s also a science fiction component, as we learn about grotesque experiments performed on children who are sequestered and brain-washed for nefarious purposes at which we can only guess.

Until the end, of course. I really liked the ending, and I was impressed (even surprised) that Hines was able to pull everything together to create a satisfying ending from such a disparate collection of threads.

The characters are three dimensional and the technology is convincing (okay, right up to the pheremones research, which was a bit sketchy and “at this point a miracle occurs”).This isn’t a book for savoring beautfiul language, but it’s a good, gripping story.