Have You Heard? – Victoria Laurie’s Fated for Felony

Abby Cooper Psychic Eye Mystery, Book 16

Written by Victoria Laurie

Narrated by Elizabeth Michaels

Unabridged Audiobook

Audible Studios (11/12/2019)

Listening Length: 10 hours 23 minutes

For years, Abby Cooper has worked alongside her husband Dutch and his boss who happens to be her best friend’s husband at the FBI. They were skeptical when she joined the team, but their record since she did has been stupendous. The Austin unit is especially good at solving cold cases, thanks to Abby’s intuitive abilities.

Three new career men join the unit and resent that the government is paying a “psychic” consultant. The three stooges contact popular podcaster and retired agent Mike Toscano to debunk her abilities. The challenge is that Abby will need to solve his oldest and coldest case file going back 15 years, on the air, live, in an hour! To add even more pressure, the fate of the Austin office is on the line along with the careers of the men and women working there.

Thankfully Abby gets the familiar tingle as she reads a summary of the file and an odd vision comes to her. She writes down her impressions which sound ludicrous to Toscano who accuses them of utter failure. The agents who work with Abby regularly trust her so much that they all agree to take vacation time to check out her vision. Toscano is too curious to turn down the offer to accompany them and follows them all to Texarkana and the lake where four women are supposedly located. There are four victims in Toscano’s file, so he is surprised when Abby tells him there is a fifth victim.

I was delighted to again be drawn into Abby’s world with her friends and co-workers. Her abilities held up to scrutiny, and I was glad the case wasn’t so cold as to offer no clues to solving it. Along the way Abby speaks to her sister Cat who discovers her husband is having an affair, which sets up a spinoff series featuring Cat in the life coach mysteries also written by Laurie.

Elizabeth Michaels returns as narrator. Somehow she just “gets” Abby and portrays her so vividly. Conversations sound realistic, including the swearing. Her pace ebbs and flows with the action, catching the listener up in the plot. This was very much a police procedural yet it was also very much a paranormal story. There was no way the mystery could be solved without Abby’s involvement, as proven by the agent’s thick cold case file. Abby’s intuition also provided the final clues needed to catch a killer.

The fate of the Austin bureau and the men working there was again caught up in Mike Toscano’s podcast, but this time Abby was eager to share hosting duties as they explain how the case was solved. Yet there is quite a twist at the end when a listener calls in with a unique question.

Definitely enjoyable.