And the moral of the story is...

If a book is recommended to you by the paranoid but sweet lady next door (who was robbed one night while you were home and just thought she was just moving her furniture), and said book also is on your Senior Class Book Recommendation list (from which you have recently decided to choose reading material), it is not necessarily a fabulous book.

Despite Gavin de Beckers' credentials in helping elected officials, movie stars, and ordinary people learn to recognize, predict and avoid patterns of violence, I found his book redundant. Basically, it asserts over and over again that people (women in particular) should trust their instinct, and should learn how to recognize their instinct because their lives or well-being could depend on whether or not they listen to it.

There are some useful chapters on language cues in potentially dangerous situations, occupational hazards, domestic violence, stalkers, and aggressive children. It's just that the whole book is peppered with the stories of his clients who failed to tune in to their intuition and as a result had horrible things happen to them (I mean, there are the success stories, too, but the failures are so traumatizing... The opening chapter tells the story of a woman who escaped from a rapist/murderer. It was awful to read.)

Anyway, the book has good nuggets of advice in it. But like the central theme, it's all instictive anyway.