A Circle of Souls by Preetham Grandhi

Psychological thrillers have got to be one of my favorite books to read. And yet for the past ten months or so I feel like I have completely abandoned them for the sake of discovering and getting familiar with other genres. In the end, my guilt and my ‘favoritism’ drove me to reach out for A Circle of Souls by Preetham Grandhi and right now I am reminded of what a feast I was missing out on by putting thrillers on a back burner.

The book starts off with a murder of a ten years old girl and it keeps you in its grips from then on. Newbury, CT is a seemingly quiet, peaceful town and the murder is all the more shocking because of that. We have an FBI agent Leia Bines, a child psychiatrist Peter Gram, who is also a nephew of a local senator, and a score of law-enforcement people trying to find a killer who not only murdered the girl but did it in a very twisted way. Dr. Peter Gram also has a new patient, a seven-year-old Naya whose inexplicable nightmares seem to have no medical basis and all of a sudden turn out to be too important to the murder case to be missed. And so, the race to find this brutal killer before he finds another innocent victim starts.

I was really taken by A Circle of Souls and its author Preetham Grandhi. It is his debut work and I think he did an excellent job. I have read scores of thrillers, especially psychological ones, and therefore I do consider myself an amateur expert on this subject. I can tell you that it’s no easy task to write a gripping tale that will keep the reader with their nose in the book until the tale is over. And I can also safely tell you that Mr. Grandhi accomplished just that. There aren’t too many characters which keeps the picture simple and clear enough for the reader to concentrate on the main plot and follow it without getting confused about who’s who and who’s done what. When I write simple, I don’t mean a story with not much depth to it. Quite the opposite, there is a lot happening but it’s easy to follow all the events and I think it’s a plus that readers are given a few main characters to think about without being blindsided by a parade of people who bring nothing to the table and their only purpose seems to be confusion. I think that most of you know what I’m talking about. Many possibly good thrillers got ruined this way. A Circle of Souls is thankfully not one of them. For a debut novel and beyond that as well, it’s a very good, sometimes even scary and full of action thriller. I enjoyed it from the first page to the last (I know it sounds a little cliché but in this case it really is true) and I am already waiting impatiently for what Mr. Grandhi produces next because he certainly is a skilled author that knows how to give us good thrills.

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Special Thanks to the author, Preetham Grandhi for sending me a copy of his book for review.

Please make sure to visit his website which dedicated to the book and looks really neat.