This book was weird. I don't remember why I put it on hold but as I was reading it, I had to keep re-calibrating what kind of book I thought it was going to be. It starts with a guy who is a traveling salesman/scam artist with a pretty sadistic streak, so I thought it was going to be about him as the bad guy since he was described as the embodiment of evil. Then he teams up with a female scam artist who is REALLY sadistic and it turns out that he is kind of dumb and not totally competent, so maybe she is the big bad. The two of them come up with this plot to kidnap to children in a long con and then escape to Mexico with the ransom money. Then the next part of the book starts and it is about this black man named Curtis who has a supernatural ability to hear some people's thoughts, but only the thoughts of others who are also "listeners," so he can carry on conversations with them across some distance. Think The Shining - in fact, think exactly The Shining, because there was so much of this that felt like a direct reference/tribute/rip-off of that book where a magical black man helps a white child with the same magical ability who is in a dangerous situation. Curtis is able to connect with the young girl who has been kidnapped by the two swindlers and he helps the authorities track them down.

I don't know- this book felt so weird to me. Everyone was acting in unrealistic ways. It felt problematic that a magical black man had to sacrifice his own safety to come to the rescue of beautiful wealthy white children. I kept questioning why he had to be black and they had to be white. Curtis' "listening" ability wasn't interesting as a supernatural phenomenon. They didn't really explore what it meant or the things that might be challenging about it. It was almost like he just had a private cell phone that connected to the kidnapped girl, and what is exciting about that? Also, there was this random maybe implied supernatural thing, or maybe a psychological disorder (?) going on with the female con artist that made no sense and just seemed to be thrown in there for no reason that made sense to me. I guess I just expected this book to be something different.