Touch the Dark by Karen Chance

Touch the Dark by Karen Chance

This was a confusing book in my opinion.

Cassandra Palmer (Cassie for short) is basically a normal human with clairvoyant abilities in a world where vampires, werewolves, fairies and ghosts coexist stealthily with humans. With her psychic abilities and the fact she can see ghosts she is very much a commodity in the vampire mafia world of Tony, a 3rd level master who killed her parents to keep her talents in his control.

Cassie escapes from Tony's clutches and three years later the book starts. A wide cast of characters is introduced including Cassie's ghost symbiot Billy Joe, several historically prominent figures (Cleopatra, Rafael, Rasputin, Jack the Ripper etc. as vampires of course), a few different ruling bodies for the magical communities (Silver Circle, European Senate, Dark Fey etc.) and some that we only really learn about in passing like Cassie's parents.

The action is quick and sometimes hard to follow especially since Cassie and Company make intuitive leaps that I might not make as a mere mortal. Still the characters and how they interact with Cassie and further the plot are interesting. I enjoyed seeing the historical characters come to life (well as vampires) and the little interesting snarky comments about how they became what they did. Cleopatra got the single line about how she wasn't bitten by an asp. Rasputin got a full paragraph about how historians had been arguing about how long it took him to die and that it was hard to kill someone who was already dead. (Historical note: Rasputin was a "holy man" in Russia in the early 1900's who curried favor with the Empress Alexandra for his hypnosis healing of her hemophiliac son Alexei. Rasputin was assasinated by Russian royals who were displeased at the influence he had with the monarchy. They fed him tea and cakes that contained mass quantities of cyanide which didn't kill him immediately as it should have. So they tried clubbing him, shooting him several times and rolling his body up in a carpet and dumping it into the river. When his body was fished out several days later it was determined that he had died of pneumonia because his lungs had filled up with water.)

In the end Cassie becomes the Pythia, a job she thoroughly does not want. She is a part of but outside the jurisdiction of everyone else in the magical community and has the power to settle disputes. Among other interesting things the previous Pythia lived for over 400 years. Cassie does not necessarily look forward to all of that and still has plenty of questions to settle about her parents and the vampires that once controlled her life. I recommend reading this one and have ordered the next one.