Touch the Dark by Karen Chance

Cassie Palmer is a clairvoyant who was raised by a vampire mob boss.

It sounded like a good idea when I first bought the book. And probably could have been if not for some glaring annoyances that I just couldn't get past.

To Chance's credit, she did tweak vampire lore a bit and make it her own; debunking the Christian/Stoker ideology that we've all grown so used to... can't go out in the sunlight, garlic is like poison, the demon that has replaced their soul makes them fear (sometimes even burn in the presence of) holy relics... and creating a semi-unique world for Cassie and her team of undead.

Now... to the complaints...

For starters, while there is nothing wrong with adults reading Harry Potter or similar stories, Touch the Dark is an adult novel. Not XXX Adult (although it does take a couple of detours into a R rating), but definitely not intended for the 12 to 16 category. However, enchanted window locks that scream when a hostage tries to open said window...very Harry Potter in context. Little annoyance, and it did go away after only one appearance...

Which leads me to my next complaint. There was just too much going on for one book. Chance really needed to make the story of Cassandra Palmer at least a trilogy, if not a series. As it was, she crammed too much information into a dimestore paperback and the end result was a lot of unanswered questions and dangling threads.

I'm never quite sure how much of the plot to "give away" in these reviews but basically, you start out reading one story, about a clairvoyant in her twenties who lived with a vampire mob until she was 16, at which time she ran away. Now the Boss has a price on her head and that's where we pick up Cassie's story.

But... about two thirds of the way through the book...yes, two thirds... the whole thing shifts and we find out that Cassandra isn't just a name that Chance plucked from the baby name book. Following a brief and somewhat muddled Greek mythology lesson, we learn that the Pythia of Delphi is an ongoing "title," as it were. As one Pythia grows old ("old" here means 2-300 years) a sybil is chosen and trained to take up the mantle when the current Pythia dies. And this is where I stop sharing the plot, for fear of giving away something important.

And my final, major complaint is...It's not uncommon for dark fantasy authors to speculate about famous (or infamous) figures from history. How many times have you read that Elvis was an alien and he didn't die, he just went home? Jack the Ripper a vampire (or nobleman, or both)? Sure! Why not? Karen Chance, however, took this plot device to a whooooooooooole new level of absurdity. Special guest stars in Touch the Dark include Cleopatra (the asp was actually a vampire), Dracula's two sons (Mircea and Radu), a Frenchman named Louis-Cesar who was turned in the seventeenth century (put that one together on your own; I did), Raphael, Rasputin, and Jack the Ripper.

Final judgment... good premise, not a bad story but way over the top, sometimes to the point of distracting.