A CURIOUS AFFAIR

Author: Melanie Jackson ISBN: 0505527383 6/2008 PARANORMAL Publisher: DORCHESTER

LIKE A THUNDERBOLT Recent widow Jillian Marsh wasn’t planning on killing herself that March night, but she hadn’t ruled it out, either. It had rained for the last seventeen days—days in which her jaws were locked together and she was unable to speak, supposing there’d been anyone worth addressing. And then there was her cat problem. Ever since she’d been hit by lightning last October, the cats in town had been talking to her. Which meant she was insane, right? But that night something changed. The cat Atherton appeared with something very interesting to say, about an odd accident that had occurred up the hill. And since Jillian could hardly go to the town’s new lawman, who’d been trained in LA and was new to this Sierra town, with a feline eyewitness, it was up to her to find out if there was indeed trouble afoot—or if this conspiracy and her newfound and unwanted attraction to Sheriff Murphy were all part of an endless hallucination.

RRAH's THOUGHTS AND PONDERINGS:

Melanie Jackson sets her paranormal romance, A CURIOUS AFFAIR, in a small fictional town in California's Sierra Mountains where author and recent widow, Jillian Marsh, has been afflicted (ever since being struck by lightning) by terrible jaw-locking pain and the ability to hear and talk to cats. One stormy night, when Jillian is ready to shuffle off this mortal coil (deep in pain and pain-killing drugs), her friend Irving's cat, Atherton, delivers the message to her that Irving has been killed and Jillian is his—and a herd of feral cats—only hope in solving the crime. This will mean having to work with the town's new hunky sheriff and Jillian isn't sure she's ready to move forward with life.

Jillian tells her tale of dark feelings, frustration with grieving, and being tired of the pain, to us in a way that sometimes screams "TOO MUCH INORMATION!" She does a lot of ruminating and living inside herself that finally evolves into a more normal life with the arrival of Atherton—and his multitude of hungry friends—and the sheriff, Tyler Murphy, oddly enough, also hungry. The romance itself doesn't even begin to emerge until the second half of the book, and when sparks do ignite, Jillian tells the readers to figure out the juicy details for themselves. That seems a bit selfish to me. If she's going to move on from being a neurotic, lonely, grieving widow and we had to slog through all of that with her, we should get the reward of a few minutes of intimate voyeurism.

Some of the book feels like filler. We meet town characters and then never see them again. We get descriptions of a music festival and its patrons, but to what point? We listen in on Jillian's interviews with various folks for an article she's writing about feline leukemia that seems a little preachy. We even get to read a short story written by Jillian's dead husband that he wrote about a boy getting kissed at eleven years old. Okay, there was a little bit of a point for that one. The story could have been really great, but it just felt like a mish mash of genres, plot points and messages.

Jackson's A CURIOUS AFFAIR is an interesting story, despite the fact that it has problems. I recommend A CURIOUS AFFAIR to any reader who likes just a tiny bit of romance with their talking cats who are seeking justice for murder and mayhem.

Susan Barton