Touching Smoke

 This wasn't terrible, but it wasn't great, either. Camille is annoying in a lot of ways, and she never really gets better. She is socially awkward in the most obnoxious way--she's extremely self-centered and it causes her to miss all sorts of things that are obviously going wrong in other people's lives. She's also not terribly bright and has that annoying YA "heroine" tendency to run straight towards the creepiest guy in the room at any given moment. If someone tells you they think he might be a murderer and you think he might be stalking you, seems like you should be running in the other direction, yeah? Is this just me? Of course, because one time he managed to help her when she was in danger, Edward Ben somehow became the center of her universe at all times, and she trusted him even when he basically told her not to. Because that is not creepy at all. There are no vampires, but this book was very clearly written riding on the Twilight wave, and sometimes the similarities are a bit too much. Unfortunately, vampires, even awkward sparkly vampires who play baseball, are just plain more interesting than what we have here in terms of paranormal stuff. Camille is awfully similar to Bella, but somehow I found the latter less annoying. Possibly because she was the first? I did enjoy the thriller aspect and I thought the handling of the second viewpoint was done pretty well. I enjoyed trying to figure out what was going on, although I did manage to figure it out well before things were revealed. Camille is a trusting little soul and does not pay attention to things that should be obvious sometimes. I won't pick up the rest of the series, but I'm not against maybe trying something else by the author, hopefully something that feels a little less derivative.