In the Heart of the Fire (Nameless: Season One, #1)

by Dean Koontz

Some psychologists would argue that a man stripped of his past must be an emotional cripple, because we are made of memories.

Jennifer Demeter lives in a modest stucco house on two acres south of the town limits. A pair of large oaks frame the isolated residence. An old Honda is parked in a carport from which paint is peeling like sunburned skin. The wood of the porch is the weathered gray that high-end designers strive to achieve for wealthy clients and that the poor endure because they lack money for paint.

Certain events are lightly sketched on the future and can be erased. Others are woven into the fabric of all that is to come and resist being unraveled.

What’s happening to the world, Mr. Shepherd? Is it all falling apart?” “Well,” he says, “for sure, we’re not living in an age of truth and grace.”

This is his life: confrontation with the darkness that has nothing to do with an absence of light.

His clairvoyance is time travel achieved without leaving the present. The curtains of the past part, and he sees what has been; the mists of the future clear, and he sees an event yet to occur.

Those who are corrupted in turn corrupt the innocent. That is the only purpose of humanity: to deceive, to use, to dominate and destroy.

If sometimes local law enforcement doesn’t want to find it or the courts don’t want to hear it, or if those who expose it might be ruined or killed for their efforts . . . Well, it’s now possible for justice to be delivered nonetheless.”