Touched - A.J. Aalto

Touched is the first book in the Marnie Baranuik Files series. It's a stand-alone novel though. This title is 99 cents for the kindle. The things I like about this book outweigh the things I don't, but it was close.

Marnie Baranuik has a Ph.D. in preternatural biology and she's a practicing witch. Marnie's also the daysitter to 435 year old vampire, who's passed on the gifts of empathy and touch. All this makes Marnie a very sought after psychic. Fame has it's drawbacks though. Marnie is the target of some very dangerous people. People who are determined to end her life, since Marnie already retired from her career. Demons, witches, ghouls, vampires, and just plain humans are after Marnie. How, and if, she survives make a tale it's hard to put down. Highly recommended.

I really like this story. The author has come up with some great new wrinkles on the paranormal theme that make it very interesting, but there are issues that almost made me quit reading more than once. First is the author's raging case of logorrhea. It can take pages for the characters in this book to get from one room to the next. The Reader's Digest Condensed version of this novel would be the size of a Jehovah's Witness pamphlet, but much more interesting. Second is the cheesy analogies. For example, "like trying to pick a wet watermelon seed off a Formica table." The effectiveness of this particular analogy is called to question, since the next part of the sentence had to explain what it meant. Third is the angst filled introspection. Marnie is so whiny and insecure it's hard to understand how she could become a character of any importance. Yet she is, and by the end of the book I was rooting for her, if for no other reason than she would stop whining. The story itself was so good I still highly recommend this book.