a neurological phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. People who report a lifelong history of such experiences are known as synesthetes.
In one common form of synesthesia, known as grapheme-color synesthesia or color-graphemic synesthesia, letters or numbers are perceived as inherently colored. In spatial-sequence, or number form synesthesia, numbers, months of the year, and/or days of the week elicit precise locations in space (for example, 1980 may be "farther away" than 1990), or may appear as a three-dimensional map (clockwise or counterclockwise). Synesthetic associations can occur in any combination and any number of senses or cognitive pathways.
When we meet the 42 year old Amos, he's a man in despair. Sixteen months before, his beloved wife and nine year old daughter had been brutally murdered and left for him to find. Since his wife had been one of the few people to understand him after his brain change, Amos has hit rock bottom. He has quit the police force, where he was a great detective for many years. He's barely making ends meet, taking on odd private investigating jobs and living out of a cheap hotel. One day that all changes when his former partner, Mary Lancaster, waltzes in and tells him that a man has just confessed to the unsolved murders of his family! Before Amos can even make it in to question the man, another tragedy hits the town....a horrific shooting of several students at the town high school, where Amos had also attended and been a football star many years before. Amos finagles his way into interviewing the confessor and deduces that he's not the person who killed his family...but he most likely knows the person who did. As the rest of the police force struggles to find the high school killer, Amos' old boss asks him to come back and consult with the police department to help figure out the killings. In doing so, Amos and his partner come to the shocking realization that the same person who killed his family committed the high school shootings....what's more....the person has left coded messages for Amos telling him that he's the reason behind everything for a slight that Amos allegedly afflicted upon the killer sometime in the past. However, Amos rewinds his mind like a VCR, as he describes it, and replays everything that has happened to him in his life over from the time he recuperated after the life-altering football hit. He can't remember dissing anyone at all, much less bad enough to have them exact such horrible revenge. In the meantime, a young reporter, Alexandra Jamison, doesn't help Amos' plight at all when she writes a very compromising story about him in the paper implying that he actually knows the man who confessed to the murders and perhaps Amos hired the man to kill his family? Jamison makes up for the article by actually becoming an ally of Amos', helping him, his partner, and the FBI man solve the mystery. Of course, this is done mostly by Amos' uncanny mind! In the end, the mystery is solved and the killer brought to justice. I wasn't that thrilled with the reasoning of the killer, but the killer ended up being someone who had been brutally assaulted as a teenager by a trusted member of the police force, and then abandoned by his parents. Receiving therapy at the same brain center as Amos twenty years before, the "slight" against Amos was that Amos stood up in their group therapy session and said he wanted to do good with his life by becoming a police officer. For that, Amos' family is slaughtered!! See? A little bit weak. But, still a good book! And, in the end, the FBI man offers both Amos and Jamison jobs to come and work for him at the FBI. I smell a sequel in the making! :-)
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