Touch the Dark

Touch the Dark (2006) Karen Chance

Cassandra is a clairvoyant who is on the run from her former vampire master. After she receives a death notice on her computer, she flees, taking only her gun from her office, and stopping only to warn her roommate that there is danger coming, and he shouldn’t go home.

First things first, there is boinking in this book. Boinking in detail. So you’ve been warned if that’s not your thing.

Aside from the boinking, however, there were some interesting questions in story. Why were the vampires after Cassandra? What would make a clairvoyant so important? What did the Vampire Senate really want from Cassandra?

The story also raises the question, what is it about vampires that people find so erotic? At best, they’re parasites. At worst, cold killers. Plus, they’re dead. So how come they can still (ahem) function? These aren’t really questions that relate specifically to Touch the Dark, but rather questions about the current fascination with vampires. (And I’m as guilty as anyone else here, which is why I’m so curious about the whole thing.)

The story is interesting, and it did go places that I wasn’t expecting. However, some of the things I found slightly confusing. For instance, mucking about with the time line seems like a really bad idea. Even if there does seem to be some sort of magic attempting to keep the future from changing.

The pace of the story is fast, which is good. It’s nice to be able to read a story in a couple of hours, and still have time left in the day to do other things. Plus I am not sure that most supernatural stories would hold up under a slower pace. Part of what makes them good is the desire to keep flipping the pages to find out what happens. A slower pace might leave one with more time to consider the plot, and things like why mucking about in the timeline doesn’t wreak more havoc.

The characters are interesting, but the ones I found most interesting were really part of the supporting cast. It’s one thing to make vampires sexy and hot, it’s something else entirely to make them interesting without resorting to sex appeal. She did a good job of making the characters of Rafe and Billy quite interesting, without having to resort to sex appeal. And it’s interesting that although she describes vampires as having the same range of appearance as humans, the majority of vampires she interacts with are described as very good looking.

Although the story arc is resolved, there are plenty of questions left open, and I presume a sequel is planned. So the resolution was good, but not great. (And after a quick check, I am correct. A sequel comes out in April.)

So it’s an interesting story with some flaws, but for a quick read it’s pretty good, and has potential to get more interesting.
Rating: 7/10

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