When Santa Monica therapist Sarah Newcomb hypnotizes her patients, most of them remember past lives, decades or centuries ago. Not Marigold Chu. The young software engineer is a receptive patient, but under hypnosis, she describes another life that seems to be in the future—or even the present. That leads to two problems. One is information from Marigold’s other self about a coming industrial explosion, which Sarah feels compelled to report (anonymously) to the authorities. The other is the realization that, instead of being a garden-variety case of reincarnation, Marigold is somehow sharing a soul with a very much alive middle-aged Denver police detective named Brian Huntley. Those two issues soon bring an FBI agent to Sarah’s door: Grant Lukather from the agency’s Predictive Analytics unit. As the trio tries to figure out what’s going on, it quickly becomes clear that Brian is in jeopardy from a serial murderer nicknamed the Ash Killer, because of a substance he smears on his victims’ foreheads—an ash whose source police forensics can’t identify. Even stranger, the man identified as the Ash Killer is already in prison. Sarah, Marigold, and Grant dash off from California to Colorado to save Brian, sparks flying—Sarah is sort-of engaged to a good-enough boyfriend, Grant reeling from a tragic romantic loss, but it doesn’t take a clairvoyant to see they’re falling for each other. The book, the first novel by an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, does little to explain the phenomenon of Marigold and Brian’s tie other than some sketchy ideas about the exploding human population outrunning the supply of souls, but it’s used to good effect in relation to the Ash Killer. Sarah and Grant toss pretty much every protocol about how therapists and law enforcement officers are supposed to behave right out the window; if you’re willing to suspend disbelief about that and communal souls, this is a suspenseful and fast-paced tale.
