I couldn’t wait any longer, Curious One! Hide’n Go Seek, the second installment of the Psychic Vision series by my new favorite paranormal author Dale Mayer took me on an incredible ride! If you remember, I read the first book of the series, Tuesday’s Child a few months ago and as soon as I found Hide’n Go Seek, I was ready to step back into the world she created for us!
Diving Back Into Dale Mayer’s Psychic Visions World With Hide’n Go Seek
If you haven’t read the first book or you would like to go back for a quick recap, just click here and it will take you there!
I don’t think there is anything negative to say! Mayer did us a well with Hide’n Go Seek. She included a couple quick cameos with Stephan, the experienced psychic that seems to be at the center of bringing each main character together, helping them hone and improve their abilities. As well as bringing up Sam, the girl from the first book, and her progress in coping with her own psychic abilities. Maybe a few characters will come together in a future book! That’d be pretty cool!
Anyways, Hide’n Go Seek takes us down the trail of a mentally fragmented killer who has decided to play a twisted version of the child’s game hide-and-go-seek with Kali and her SAR dog, Shiloh.
This killer is referenced as The Texan throughout most of Hide’n Go Seek and his true identity isn’t revealed until the final pages.
I want to reveal to you though, Curious One, that I had a feeling that Brad was the killer! I didn’t “know” know, but you’ve felt that that initial reaction to the reveal before. You know what I mean, right? When you discover without a doubt who the killer is, you realize you knew all along?
Well, that’s how I felt about The Texan (aka Brad)!
More Than One Message Inside the Pages of Hide’n Go Seek
I think that Hide’n Go Seek has an important underlying message and I want to address it.
So, Kali, Brad, Jarl, Grant, Dan, Stephan, all of them really – they all have these intense, high-stress, emotion charged jobs and specialties. This can easily cause a fracturing of the mind if you don’t take the time to dump the heavy emotions that accrue over time spent handling emotional moments.
I mean, come on. Search and Rescue work is heavily emotional, and Grant is an FBI agent which can be steadily emotionally draining, and Stephan can hear and feel the people around him. Everyone in Hide’n Go Seek works in and around high stress jobs that center off emotion.
What I’m trying to get at here is that Brad’s mind “broke” as a result of the trip to Mexico when they found a little girl alive who was then crushed in a collapse with a handful of other rescue workers. His mind just simply couldn’t handle the pain any longer.
Brad was spending days after every incident getting blackout drunk and trying to cope with the emotional baggage of working search and rescue sights. That was his way of trying to cope. But it obviously only worked for so long. As it does for most alcoholics. At some point, the alcohol stops helping, and it makes things worse.
Plausible? Or Completely Insane?
He began to believe that God had intended to kill all of those who survive natural disasters. And since the search and rescue teams were counteracting that result, he had to right the wrongs and began targeting individuals who had previously survived.
Because Kali was the “best on the west” he chose her to target specifically. Not because she survived a natural disaster, but because she was the best at finding and rescuing people who were trapped in the rubble.
That was when he started the game of hide-and-go-seek with Kali. He was burying survivors and expecting Kali to rescue them – and in her failure, furthering the proof in his mind that he was doing as God originally intended.
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Inside the Maniacal Mind of Hide’n Go Seek
I like to think that there is a reason behind what people do. I clearly don’t approve or condone what society calls evil behavior, but if you go into the minds of bad people, they have what seems to them as sufficient cause for their actions.
Even if they don’t care and just wanted to do something bad. To them, that is enough reason.
Brad went from a respectable member of search and rescue to a serial killer meting out fate in the name of God.
I might not understand the steps it takes to accept being a criminal and wanting to kill people, but I can understand how a mind could fracture under near-constant emotional distress.
We all have something that we grasp onto when we need to decompress from a stressful day. For some it’s coffee, others want baked goods or maybe a hour or two of playing a video game. For me, I want to read.
I want to shut off everything that makes a noise. My phone, the television, radio, everything. I shut it all off and grab a book. Maybe it’s a book I have read a dozen times or maybe it’s a new author. I’m not usually that picky. I just need to read. Reading gives me a chance to escape my worries. I get so caught up in the world I enter that I don’t think about what went wrong or what caused me frustration throughout the day.
Think about what keeps you sane, Curious One. Think about it and don’t let it go.
Back to Hide’n Go Seek
Sorry! This is turning more into a mental health discussion than it is about Dale Mayer’s Hide’n Go Seek!
Back to the book!!!
Kali has psychic abilities! Hahah! She can see bands of light that connect to bodies. Lifeless bodies mostly. Like Sam in Tuesday’s Child, Kali connects to people who have fallen victim to killers. She sees a gray or black thread that leads her towards the body.
She’s been able to cover it mostly by working with Shiloh. She uses Shiloh as cover and does her best to make it look like Shiloh found the body, not herself.
It’s kind of smart, really. And the ability recently surfaced so all her success as a search and rescue worker was from hard work and raw talent. Not her psychic abilities.
I like that. It’s nice to have a character in a book that doesn’t rely solely on their psychic ability. And even better, after Kali was shot and she went to help the search for Julie (the latest victim) she had to use Shiloh!
It’s a relief that Kali wasn’t all “I can do this on my own! I’m a psychic!”
It made her more relatable and realistic. Her talents were made more realistic because of that too. She pretty much was saying, I can’t do this alone because I don’t constantly see a million streams of black light that connect to murder victims. Shiloh does the hard work just as much, if not more, than Kali. If you have a dog, Curious One, a dog who is your best friend and who never leaves your side, you understand why this was important to me.
A Good Guy Doing Bad Things
Of course, harm had to come Kali’s way somehow. It was interesting to me that Mayer wrote in the second bad guy. I mean, was Jarl really a bad guy though? Or was he a good guy doing bad things to help his wife?
Yes, he attacked Dan in the office and almost killed him. And yes, he shot Kali and almost killed her. In the previous year he was stealing from the rescue center, yes, but he stopped when Kali confronted him.
BUT… But Curious One, Jarl’s wife was undergoing massive amounts of chemo that weren’t working and they had no money left with an insurmountable pile of debt. He felt like he had no other options.
I think it was a little bit extreme that he shot Kali to try to hide the fact that he was stealing again, but it could make a weird bit of sense I suppose. If you’ve already attacked and thought you killed your boss to cover your tracks, why wouldn’t you also just get rid of the only other person who knew about it?
Anyways, I enjoyed the fact that Mayer threw us a new loop with the shooting. It made no sense for The Texan to shoot Kali, so it was a good twist! Your mind instantly wants to lay it on the killer in Hide’n Go Seek, but if you pause for a moment and think about it, it’s pretty obvious it couldn’t be The Texan!
More Harm Done In Hide’n Go Seek
Shiloh got shot too. Not at the same moment, of course, you go through almost the entire book before she gets hurt. I don’t know about you, but I was holding my breath for that entire chapter.
Brad had killed the team surveilling Kali’s house and when he entered, Shiloh came to the rescue. When Kali gets away from Brad, she finds Shiloh in the closet in a pool of blood.
Kali whisks her from the home to the emergency vet and though she lost a lot of blood, Shiloh survives. I had a moment of annoyance at Grant for getting angry and upset at Kali for having left without telling him. Seriously.
I understood where he was coming from. Brad, was taking out his men, trying to kill the woman he loved, and he couldn’t find her, but I still got annoyed by him. I hopefully would have done the same think Kali did if I were in her shoes. I’d like to think that I would have thought to call my significant other after getting my dog to the vet, but if it were a brand-new relationship, I’m not sure I would have. I would be consumed with fear.
Fear oftentimes makes us do stupid things.
Kali headed back to her house after Shiloh was operated on and kept for observance. This is when Grant gets taken by Brad. Kali goes crazy and with the rest of Grant’s FBI team, they find him with her psychic power, save him and Brad gets buried under a cliff collapse.
Kind of fitting, if you ask me….
In the End
Grant and Kali accept their newfound attraction, Shiloh gets better and thankfully does NOT die, Dan discovers he has cancer and decides to live his final months with friends instead of undergoing chemo for a few extra months of life, Jarl ends up in prison for the attempted murder of both Dan and Kali, but Kali hopes that he is allowed to remain a “free” man for the next 2 months – until his wife passes from her cancer – Brad’s wife hates Kali, blaming her for Brad’s “choices” and Julie is found alive, on her own path to recovery.
A lot happened in Hide’n Go Seek, but that’s what makes it such an incredible book! I could barely put it down, Curious One. I didn’t want it to stop!
Other than a couple head-tilts that happened, I would put this series, thus far, at the head of my paranormal top five list!
I have yet to read something from Dale Mayer that is “bad” and I can’t wait to get back into the Psychic Vision series with book three sometime!
Be Prepared for More Dale Mayer!
I apologize if this curiosity seemed more like a soap-box lecture on mental health than it did about the second installment of the Psychic Vision series by Dale Mayer, but I felt like with every single character, the emotional strain on their psyche’s was what drove Hide’n Go Seek to the home plate, making it all to easy to relate to.
Hopefully this discussion on Hide’n Go Seek didn’t alter the course of a beautiful day for you, Curious One! Keep your smile on and remember to decompress with your favorite method before your own mind fractures. Let’s all help each other out if someone is having a bad day.
📚 …I’m thinking it’s about time for another book… 📚
All of Dale Mayer’s information is in the discussions on Tuesday’s Child and Vampire in Denial, but here it is again, just in case you missed them!
Check out Dale Mayer at the following links:
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Website
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