Onward to premise: There are creatures called ghosts who have the power to move from one body to another simply by touching skin. Ghosts can only die if they are cannot get out of their dying body quickly enough. Our nameless, genderless protagonist, known to their enemies as Kepler, watches their host, a woman named Josephine, get gunned down in a Metro station by a killer who was plainly briefed on Kepler’s body-jumping talents. Though Kepler escapes alive, they are determined to find out who arranged for Josephine’s death, and why.

The brilliance of Touch is in the mechanics — and y’all know, if you spend much time around here, that I love a story that gets its hands dirty mucking around in the mechanics of its premise. Kepler has been jumping bodies for over two hundred years, and they know a thing or two. You can get lost permanently in rush hour traffic. Anyone chasing you will be looking for people who have lost time; you can mitigate the obviousness of that by pumping your bodies full of drugs and alcohol before taking off for the next one; campsite rule applies when you’re at your leisure, and other times your host body might just have to take a hit. (Or a bullet.)

If there was anything disappointing about this fast-paced, brilliantly conceived book, it’s that all the brilliance of premise and running and detecting and THEMES was in service of such a disappointing goal. There’s this ghost called Galileo who does massacres and is a psychopath. It’s fine, as a macguffin, the way it’s fine in Sunshine to be hunting this one big master evil vampire, but in Touch I wished that the characters’ goals were as unexpected and fascinating as their means of achieving them.

Read it please! And report back to me!

Jeanne! This seems like quite a you sort of book! (My feelings won’t be hurt if you don’t care for it, though.)

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