Body & Soul is a ghost romance with a little romantic suspense thrown in for good measure. If you can work your way through the somewhat distant first part, you’ll find a good read here. Author Krinard dazzled me in the past with earlier works, so this one was a bit disappointing, but still better than the average romance.

Jesse Copeland’s mother committed suicide in the town of Manzanita when Jesse was about eleven. Jesse suffered a breakdown at the funeral and was hospitalized for months, then placed in a series of foster homes. Now an adult, Jessie has returned to Manzanita to face her demons and settle down. She is the member of a search and rescue team, and at another funeral (for a boy she was unable to save), she sees Gary Emerson. Her memories come rushing back. Gary was her mother’s abusive boyfriend. Jesse attacked him at her mother’s funeral those many years before. Now he’s running for state assemblyman and has also returned to town to discover if Jesse remembers anything.

Gary’s presence triggers strange dreams in Jesse. One night she screams out the name David. He appears and she discovers that he is a ghost. David must receive Jesse’s forgiveness before he can leave the limbo where he has lingered for two centuries. Why? Because Jesse is the reincarnation of David’s wife Sophie.

Okay. Deep breath. There is obviously a lot going on in this book. The major thread here is the romance that develops between Jesse and David, but there a couple of other components as well. Jesse tries to find out Gary’s secret and also befriends a little girl named Megan, the niece of her best friend. All this is tied together, and in time you may start wondering if everyone in the town was someone in Jesse and David’s previous life.

I felt unconnected to these characters at the beginning, but by the end of the book I had tears in my eyes (this is a rare thing indeed). Jesse is tough, almost brittle at first, but as David enters her life and she starts to believe him, she begins to open up. I liked David from the beginning, but he became even better as his feelings for Jesse developed. In the best tradition of romance, he intends to stay emotionally unattached, but eventually find that he can’t.

The distance from the characters I felt in the beginning left open the way for their development later in the book, but I want to like my characters for more than half the book. Jesse was off-putting because she was so emotionally tough. And, then there was author Krinard’s flowery writing style, which I noticed initially. Thankfully, by the time I started enjoying the book, the writing style ceased to be a problem for me. And, Jesse’s level of caring for Megan was a little too fast for me, too, but there’s a good reason (revealed later) for it.

Ms. Krinard worked her magic with Body & Soul in the second half. The scene near the end of the book where Jesse and David realize their love and each says they will give up something precious if the other can only go on and be happy is very powerful (hence the tears). Basically, the last 50 pages or so made this book worth the read for me.

The back of this book gives a preview for Krinard’s next book, the beginning of a werewolf trilogy. Considering how much I loved Prince of Shadows and Prince of Wolves, I can’t wait!