Blood Ties

Blood Ties is the ninth book in Kay Hooper’s Bishop Special Crimes Unit series, the long running romantic suspense and paranormal mystery franchise that has been one of the genre’s quieter successes for more than two decades. The Bishop SCU is a fictional FBI unit made up of agents with verifiable psychic abilities. Telepaths, empaths, mediums, precognitives, and a rotating cast of others, all working under the leadership of Special Agent in Charge Noah Bishop, who has his own significant abilities.

The series is divided into loose trilogies that share connected casts and overlapping plot threads. Blood Ties wraps up one of these connected sets, with the SCU pursuing a particularly dangerous serial killer whose abilities mark him as one of the rare bad guys with talents matching the team’s own. The novel weaves together several plot lines that have been building across the previous books, with familiar characters from earlier entries returning to play significant roles in the climax.

Kay Hooper writes the kind of romantic suspense that takes both halves of the genre seriously. The procedural plotting is solid, the psychic abilities are handled with internal consistency rather than as convenient deus ex machina solutions, and the romances grow out of shared danger and professional respect rather than just chemistry. The team dynamic across the series is well developed, and longtime readers care about the agents as a group as much as they care about each book’s central couple.

For longtime Bishop SCU readers, Blood Ties is a satisfying entry that pays off plot threads from earlier books. For new readers, the series rewards being read in order, but Hooper handles enough recap that newcomers can pick up Blood Ties without feeling completely lost. Readers who enjoy J.D. Robb’s In Death series, Karen Rose’s romantic suspense, or Carla Neggers’s procedural mysteries will find familiar territory in Hooper’s catalogue.