Touch by Claire North

Another high concept book by Claire North. This time the hero is a person who, while being murdered in the 19th century, discovered that he (or she – the gender is never specified and after two centuries of swapping bodies it doesn’t really matter) can instantly invade the mind of anyone she touches. The personality of the individual invaded goes to “sleep” and has no sense of time passing at all, be it two seconds or twenty years. It is a bit disconcerting if you are invaded in your twenties and abandoned on your death bed after fifty or so years…

There are other beings like him, and they somehow are able to sense each other, and may have personal connections spanning centuries and almost countless bodies. It turns out that there is an organization that hunts creatures like this and it doesn’t hesitate, even hurting the body of the host if there is a chance to kill one of the “spirits”. But when one can invade any personality instantly with a touch, it isn’t easy to imprison a creature like that.

An entertaining, smoothly and, in places, even poetically told story. There were some inconsistencies, and it was far too easy for the organization to hunt the mind-swapping beings. Even if they had complete access to all hospital records in the world, there would have been no way in hell to find out whether normal people were carrying an invader and where the invader went. This is perhaps the least good of the author’s stories of unusual people, but it was a good read nevertheless.


426 pp.