2008-02-12 Good paranormal romantic thriller

Under the name Jayne Castle, J A Krentz created a series of science fiction/fantasy books based on a planet called Harmony. On Harmony the senses of the human imigrants were enhanced, particulary those of our dormant psychic or para-normal senses. JC forms different classes of people with hightened para-normal senses e.g. the hunters, the empaths etc., and they are given a scale rating from one - ten (ten being the highest) as to how good their para-normal sense is.

Being other world light-hearted fantasy novels this worked quite well and the explanation of the extra sense and its rating worked into the stories well.

JAK has now extended this to present time earth, which is okay. However, in her previous book before Sizzle and Burn, I was bored out of my mind by the continuous lengthy explanations of the para-normal sense and its rating on the Richter Scale (pardon my sarcasm!) and consequently found the book very hard to settle into. She would have been perhaps been better just doing a Heather Graham and stating that these people have strong psychic senses and what each can do and leaving it at that; instead of going into great detail on the psycho-babble imaginery scaling etc.

In my opinion Sizzle and Burn is a better and more interesting book than her previous one, even though it follows the same agency and theme. There are less lengthy explanations of the parnormal abilities and scaling etc.

This book still includes the Arcane Society and J&J Investigations and the search for the psycho-enhancing drug which has fallen into the baddies hands.

Raine Tallentyre can pick up voices from objects that she touches. Her Aunt Vella has recently died and while visiting the house that Vella has left to her, Raine senses that a twisted personality, a witch-burner, has recently visted and finds a young woman imprisoned in the basement, the next victim of the Burner.

This brings Zack Jones of the Arcane Society and J&J Investigations onto her doorstep. Raine is the daughter of a brilliant chemist who stole the Arcane Society's founders 'receipe' for the psycho enhancing drug and proceeded to experiment with it. He was subsequently kicked out of the Society, his lab burned and he himself killed in a road accident. This all happened when Raine was seven.

The head of J&J believes that Tallentyre's formula is now being sought by Dr Quinn (out of the previous book), who has absconded with the founder's formulae and like Tallentyre before him is experimenting with it. It has however fallen into the hands of the baddies. The problem is that the drug is unstable and those who use it go mad.

Raine associates J&J with the death of her father and feels that she can't trust Zack even though he is emmensely attracted to him and vice versa. He asks her to work with him in order to track down the drug and her Aunt's murderer.