Cassie Palmer’s not your usual twenty-something – she’s clairvoyant, can talk to ghosts, and was raised by vampires. Well, until she discovered, when she was fourteen, that the vamp who raised her had arranged for her parents to be killed. Since then she’s been on her own. That is until the day she came back to the office after lunch to discover a copy of her own obituary on her computer. Now Cassie’s on the run, for the second time, and it’s not just vampires after her.
Lynn gave me this book, and I was very much hoping she’d reviewed, as I can’t remember what she’d thought of it. Sadly this must have been before we began the blog (I'm woefully behind in my reading) and so I'm on my own.
Sorry if you loved it Lynn – I hated Touch the Dark and finished it only because of the dearth of English-language books in Opatija and Rijeka (there may be an English-language bookshop, I don’t want to make any assumptions, but I couldn’t find it). I did read it in a more disjointed fashion than usual, spread over a few days instead of oer the course of a few hours, but as this is the way most people read it shouldn’t have presented a problem.
I didn’t care about the character, her talents or her mission; I found the plot garbled, contradictory, unnecessarily complicated, and consisting primarily of loosely connected fight scenes and chunks of exposition that make me unsure whether this was part of a series (“previously, on Touch”) or scene setting, but clumsy either way. Clearly, in Chance’s universe, vampire politics are complex, hierarchical and intertwined; some authors can integrate this into the text as part of the background. Chance can’t. All the in-fighting, betrayal, flipping between he present and the past (in some cases several centuries back), Black and White Circles, were-rats, sybils, faries and satyrs were too much.
There were a couple of amusing notes, like the Pythia (a kind of Queen of the Psychic Seers) telling Cassie that the vampires believe a new Pythia can not be a virgin because, tired of enforced virginity, a Pythia in ancient Greece had a ‘vision’ that sexual experience made for stronger seers. Now I think of it, that was really the only amusing note.According to the cover rave, Kelley Armstrong hopes there’s a sequel. There probably will be, but I'm not reading it. - Alex
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