This month’s pick is Adam by Ted Dekker
This dark disturbing thrill ride may not be what you were expecting from a book released by a Christian publisher. Welcome to the world of Ted Dekker, who exposes evil in all its gruesomeness but also shows that the power of God’s light can overcome evil’s darkness. In Adam that evil comes in the form of “Eve”–a serial killer of women who is hunted by Daniel Clark. Daniel is convinced that Eve’s compulsion to kill is the result of the religious beliefs he was exposed to as a child. Daniel’s profiling of Eve helps his FBI team get close to catching the elusive killer–so close that Daniel gets a glimpse of the killer just before he is shot in the head. Amazingly Daniel doesn’t die–his partner is able to resuscitate him and he becomes obsessed with the secrets to Eve’s identity that he believes are now locked inside his own head. But the real key to Eve’s identity leads him to confront an evil and apparently supernatural power that the atheistic Daniel never expected to find.
Dekker dares to portray demon possession with frightening detail, and raises questions about whether or not it exists in our modern world. Reading Adam is not for the faint of heart, though the hunt for the serial killer storyline is fairly straightforward and full of enough twists and turns to keep the reader turning the pages. I enjoyed the suspense of this story and the darkness was tolerable–more so than in some of Dekker’s other recent books. If you enjoy books written from a Christian point of view that don’t sugarcoat the reality of evil than Dekker is definitely an author you will enjoy–and the fast pace and thrills of Adam make this a great book of his to put at the top of your “to read” list.