Bishop / Special Crimes Unit

About the Bishop / Special Crimes Unit series

Kay Hooper's Bishop/Special Crimes Unit series follows an FBI task force built around agent Noah Bishop, who recruits and runs a shifting roster of profilers who all share a genuine psychic gift -- precognition, telepathy, empathic sensing of violence -- alongside standard investigative training. The unit is deployed to cases regular law enforcement can't crack: serial predators, cult violence, and killers who leave almost no conventional evidence behind. Hooper launched the series with a trilogy, Stealing Shadows, Hiding in the Shadows and Out of the Shadows (all 2000), before settling into a pattern of loosely linked trilogies -- the 'Evil' books, the 'Fear' books, the 'Blood' books -- that each stand largely on their own while slowly filling in Bishop's unit and its command structure. Later entries (from Haven onward) move to a slower release rhythm and increasingly foreground the unit's internal politics and the psychics' own relationships alongside the case of the week. Across two decades the series has stayed consistent in blending police-procedural plotting with genuinely supernatural stakes -- these are not psychics whose gift might be explained away, but people whose visions and hunches are reliably, dangerously real. The most recent entry, Curse of Salem (2021), closes out a two-book arc set in a town shaped by its witch-trial history that began with Hidden Salem the year before.