The Unseen: By T.L. Hines

"I always feel like somebody's watchin' meeeeeee..." Remember that 80's song?

Ever feel like you're being watched? The Unseen by T.L. Hines will make you think maybe you're not imagining things after all.

Lucas is a Peeping Tom--sort of. He lives on the fringes of society, in the shadows and nooks and crannies where no one's supposed to be. And then when HE is discovered, he's forced to make choices that rip his anonymity away forever. He's forced to deal with people face-to-face instead of watching from a distance and imagining what their lives are really like.

I won't spill the beans on this of course, but the thrill ride made me go from feeling sorry for Lucas (even though he sort of creeped me out a little at first). I wanted him to succeed until the end, when he is ready to sacrifice all--I wanted to stand up and cheer for him.

This book has bad guys, good guys, really bad guys, international intrigue, the ticking bomb, and a story that kept twisting around on itself until the end made me go--aha!! The Unseen says a lot about our voyeuristic yet detached society in a frightening way.

I was SO glad to read this over vacation, where I didn't HAVE to put it down right away, because I didn't want to.

As a writer, I really enjoyed this book, too. I want to say that we writers have a responsibility when reading someone else's book, to read it first for the pure enjoyment of the story and not critique the thing in our heads. It's not our place. This is a product bought by a publisher and produced for enjoyment and already printed. It's not our business to "fix" it in our minds. It's tempting, though, sometimes to do that when we writers read, and that's not a fair practice.

But as a writer, I was reading The Unseen and I thought,"Wow, I can see what he did here. That's so COOL! He definitely upped the suspense."

And I loved seeing how Lucas changed throughout the story. I couldn't help thinking that as I read.

One of those books that makes me say, "I wanna write like this when I grow up." This was the first book by TL Hines that I've read, and it won't be the last.