Kevin Relling was a double agent who betrayed his country by working with Al-Qaeda. Five years ago, Lee Zander assassinated Kevin at the request of a high ranking French general after Kevin raped and murdered his daughter. Kevin's father, Jim Doane will not let Kevin's death stop him from fulfilling his son's wishes. In Taking Eve, book one, Doane kidnaps Eve and forces her to do a reconstruction on Kevin's skull, but his true goal is to lure Zander into the open. Zander is Eve's father and Doane wants to kill Eve just as Zander killed Kevin. Book two Hunting Eve, tracks Eve's friends and family as they unite to rescue Eve from Doane. In SILENCING EVE, the hunt continues as Doane reveals his true madness and the extent to which Kevin went to destroy America. Doane will stop at nothing to fulfill Kevin's wishes. With so many threads of the investigation spinning out, those closest to Eve have no choice but to divide the investigation between them and follow the clues back to the beginning: Kevin Relling's evil.

SILENCING EVE is the seventeenth book in the Eve Duncan series and the third book in this particular trilogy within the series. I'm a fan of Eve and all of Johansen's characters that spin around Eve's world, but SILENCING EVE was a little harder for me to slip into and enjoy. One of the things that first drew me to Johansen's work was her fantastic ability to give depth and insight into the darkness within a human. Eve's despair and grief over losing her daughter, Jane's struggle to adapt into a family with Eve and Joe after she'd been abandoned and every criminal Eve helped track down helped highlight what to me was essential about this series; a person's choice in shaping their own life. That feeling of choice is lost as the series has moved into the more mystical black and white world of good and evil. I always loved Eve's ability to talk to Bonnie, her dead daughter, but as Bonnie has shifted into an angelic figure who watches over Eve the eventual need for a dark demon who can also influence a life past death could be seen coming. So enters Kevin Relling. He is the dark to Bonnie's light. He too has an unnatural ability to direct his parent's choices and actions, but where there had been previous books to show Eve's growth and the choices she made to re-make herself, Kevin is shown to be in direct control of his parents. It's as if their will had evaporated at his birth and their lives were no longer their own but his to control. It's set-up so Kevin was born evil, straight to the core evil. The choice has gone and this disturbs me because it doesn't feel like the series that I absolutely fell in love with.

The beginning of SILENCNG EVE is slow to start as there is lots of exposition to sum up the last two books in this series as well as build up each important character's relationship to Eve. Johansen handles this through dialogue which does sound a bit unnatural, but once this base is established and the current plot of this book starts the pacing picks up and some of Johansen's usual magic can be seen. There are a few moments of predictability and melodrama which takes away from the intricate deduction skills and varied threads of the investigation which on their own would have been superb.

SILENCING EVE isn't my favorite Eve Duncan book. At times, slow and predictable and a little heavy-handed with the good vs. evil theme, this seventeenth book seems to have veered sharply from the original spark that makes Eve a fantastic, interesting, and compelling character. If you're a fan of this new direction, then SILENCING EVE will fulfill your expectations and continue to expand on Jane's role as a driving force in the series. If though, you're reading this with only a working knowledge of the initial books in the series, there will be sharp gap in expectations that might leave you wanting.