Not sure how I feel about this one, I really like Harry and Batten, but Marnie made me crazy. ( )

Too bad there are not negative stars. This was truly awful.

LOVED it! Review to come. ( )

The characters were amazing. The author did such a fantastic job of bringing them to life that after I was done reading it, I had to remind myself that they weren’t real people. The heroine, Marnie Baranuik, is absolutely hysterical. My mom used to tell me I “cuss like a trucker”, but I have nothing on Marnie. She definitely taught me some fun new words; unfortunately, none that I will repeat here for fear of offending someone. Trust me though, they had me literally laughing out loud. Besides having an impressive potty mouth, she was also brave, clever, and stubborn to a fault. There were a few times I wished I could reach my hands through the pages to slap some sense into her. This was usually when one of the FBI agents or her roommate, Harry, offered to help her and she refused, generally putting herself in a life or death situation. It was infuriating it at times, but I like to think that she did this to save the people she cared about, since she felt at least partly responsible for all of them being in danger. The one person Marnie wanted to shield more than anyone was her roommate Harry, or Lord Harrick Dreppenstedt, who also happened to be vampire (or revenant, as they are referenced in this book). She was his DaySitter, which means that she protected him during the day when he was most vulnerable. They shared a bond which allowed Marnie to draw on Harry’s Talents and use them; this is the source of her psychic powers. I fell in love with Harry immediately, even though his way of speaking was sometimes a little odd and confusing. It’s understandable though, because he’s over 400 years old and English. I agree with Marnie when she said:
“…when he says it, he uses big antique words that hurt my head.” (pg. 288, eBook)
There were a few times I swear my brain hurt trying to figure out what the heck he was saying; luckily, Marnie usually followed it up with a sentence of two giving the general gist of what he said. Most of the time he just spoke regally and it was easy to understand. The other character worth mentioning is Special Agent Mark Batten, who also does some revenant killing in his spare time. He was also known as Kill-Notch because he got a symbol tattooed on his chest every time he successfully killed a revenant. Let’s just say he had a lot of notches, thus his nickname. He had a professional and sexual history with Marnie, which made things tense a lot of times. He was a badass, no doubt about it, and incredibly charming. I have sort of mixed feelings about him though, which I’m about to explore further.
I hesitate to call the romance in this book a love triangle. Sure, she had a history with Mark, but I felt that the chemistry between Marnie and Harry was much more intense, even though they had never gotten together romantically. This may seem strange, considering they obviously have feelings for each other and live together; don’t worry this is all explained later on in the novel. For some reason I didn’t connect as much to Mark. Marnie’s memories of their sexy times were pretty hot, but I was praying that they wouldn’t hook up again. Call me crazy I guess; I’m not sure what that says about me that I’d rather have the hot, undead guy to the hot, alive guy. Eh, luckily we’re not scrutinizing my mind. Moving on!
I’m so excited about Touched because finally an author pulled off a mystery/suspense novel in the correct way. I do not want to read a book where I know what’s going to happen 100 pages before it does. I want to be given clues, but I hate when it’s spelled out for me. I found that in this book. Sure, there were still a few things I was able to guess early on. There were times I thought I knew what was going to happen, only to be thrown for a loop. There were yet other times when I was completely blindsided by plot twists. I enjoyed every second of it. ( )