Rose has written several thrillers featuring the theme of reincarnation. What drew my interest to this was the inclusion of French culture and the paranormal, so I thought I would give this a try. After winning the giveaway for this new novel by Rose, I discovered that it features the same main protagonist as her previous one, so I found a copy of that to read. Sadly, I probably would have liked this more if I hadn’t done that.

One characteristic of these stories is the use of multiple plot lines that span different time eras that converge together at the end by virtue of the reincarnation theme. A difficulty of Rose’s previous novel was that she also included a present day political thriller into this mix as well, causing the work to lack focus. Here, this is improved, but at the same time, it loses the large-scale significance. As the continuation of the story of the protagonist, Jac, it also runs into the difficulty that the previous book deeply explored the link between memory and smell in relation to the perfumery business of Jac’s family. Here, a great deal of the magic achieved in Rose’s writing in this perfume-memory link is lost, the thread being replaced by the paranormal, occult themes related to the séances of Victor Hugo while on the Channel island of Jersey in exile.

In this paranormal theme Rose again shows her ability to compose some really beautiful prose. She is great with words, she crafts a decent thriller filled with mystique and some chills. However, the major problems I had with her last book in characterizations and achieving a believable voice for different time periods/cultures remains a defect in “Seduction”. While the present-day characters are rendered well, those of the other time periods are far less so, particularly Celtic characters from BCE in passages with word choices that simply appear anachronistic and jarring – albeit not ‘spoken’ in dialogue, it makes the overall tone of these chapters indistinguishable from those set in the present.

What really caused me to enjoy this less than the previous novel, however, was that the overall structure and reincarnation themes that are the central crux of the entire work were already familiar to me. If I had read all the other novels in the series I cannot imagine what new insight this would present. But for those that really like that formula, I guess they will love this just as much as Rose’s other novels. While her last novel piqued my interest with the poetic discussions and history of fragrances to balance out the reincarnation ‘preachiness’, the paranormal aspects in “Seduction” just weren’t strong enough in atmosphere or creepiness to catch such interest from me.