body & shouldRating: 4.75 stars
Buy Links: 
 Amazon | All Romance
Length: Novel


throwback thursdayBefore I jump into the review, I just want to welcome you guys to the first post in a new feature we are starting here at Joyfully Jay for Throwback Thursday.  We all have favorite books that we have never reviewed here. And just about all of us have huge piles in our libraries of books we have never gotten a chance to read.  It is an occupational hazard of reviewing – there is always something new and shiny being offered.  So I decided to start a weekly Throwback Thursday post where we will review a book that is at least two years old.  We will have one per week and we already have a bunch lined up for you guys. That doesn’t mean the rest of our reviews will always be current books, but we will be sure to have an older book for review on Thursdays.  We are really excited about this so we hope you enjoy it as much as we do!

So for our first Throwback Thursday, I decided to review Body & Soul from Jordan Castillo Price’s amazing Psy Cops series. This is one of my all time favorite series and I am trying to do a reread so I can finally get to her newest book in the series.  I already reviewed Among the Living and Criss Cross here and seriously, if you are not reading this series you should be!  Ok, on to the review…

It is about six weeks from the end of Criss Cross and Victor has been trying to get by without the Auracel that helps dull his senses as a level 5 medium.  While the drugs stop him from seeing and hearing quite so many ghosts, they also leave him out of it a lot of the time and he is trying to go clean. But it is not easy being surrounded by ghosts who insist on interacting with him.

Vic’s attempts at normalcy extend to having Thanksgiving dinner with Jacob’s family.  Victor isn’t totally sure what his gorgeous boyfriend sees in him and worries Jacob will eventually decide Vic is too much trouble.  Fortunately for him, Jacob loves Victor and gets off on the psychic side of him so things are all good, even when Vic sees an unexpected ghost at dinner.  But dinner is interrupted with a call from Chicago.  There are several missing persons that might be connected and their boss wants Victor to figure out if these folks are dead.

With Victor’s medical leave apparently up, he heads back to the job and meets his new partner, Bob Zigler.  Zig is a fireplug of a man with a Ditka mustache and an old school style about him.  Between the medium thing and the gay thing, Victor isn’t so sure how Zig is going to feel about being his partner, but the guys work surprisingly well together (at least after Zig tests Victor a bit).  As they work to find the connection between the missing persons and figure out if they are alive or dead, the case takes them around the city.  With the help of some ghostly witnesses, Victor and Zig find out what happened to these folks and it turns out even creepier than they imagined.

Meanwhile on the home front, Victor and Jacob are domesticating.  Jacob has been living with Victor since his own apartment was the center point of a very gross incubus explosion.  Now he is looking for a new place and Victor is going with him.  But finding a place in the city that not only is convenient to both their jobs, but also ghost free, is not an easy task.  Weeks of house hunting is not going well, and Victor worries Jacob will just give up on him, but fortunately finding the perfect home happens when they least expect it.

So I was thrilled to jump back into the Psy Cops world with Body & Soul. As I said, it is one of my all time favorite series and I really love this book because to me it is when things really heat up with Victor and Jacob, both in the hot and sexy way, and also in the romantic way.  They are now pretty settled together and getting ready to move into a new home.  It is clear that they are crazy about one another.  Victor never understands quite what his poster boy boyfriend sees in him, but as readers it is crystal clear just how much Jacob loves him.  They are super hot here and seeing them settling down makes me all warm and fuzzy.

The other focus of the story is the mystery end of things.  This is a bit on the light end in terms of intensity. Victor is certain pretty early on that these guys are all dead, so there isn’t a lot of urgency in the investigation (though the climax is definitely creepy).  What I got most out of it was seeing Victor settling in with his new partner and the sense of disconnect Victor has with the rest of the force.  It has always been clear that Vic is somewhat of an awkward guy.  His social skills aren’t really helped by the whole seeing dead people thing.  But here we really see how on the outside that puts him as other cops avoid him and think he is weird and and creepy.  So I liked the little bit of insight we get here into Vic’s world, and also to see him settle in with Zig and find a surprisingly good partnership.

As with all the books, Jordan Castillo Price has such fabulous writing.  This is how the story opens, and it tells you so much about Victor in just a few paragraphs:

“Uncle Jacob? Did you get to shoot anybody since last summer?”

Jacob’s nephew, Clayton, asked this with the eagerness and joy of a kid who’d just learned that school was cancelled. Clayton was in fifth grade. I have no idea how old that would make him.

“You shot someone last summer?” I muttered, smoothing my napkin on my lap to the point where I probably looked like I was playing with myself. Not exactly the impression I’d wanted to make on Jacob’s family on our first Thanksgiving together.

The muttering? Not usually my style, but I was feeling uncharacteristically mouthy. It seemed like the moment I had a thought, it made its way through my vocal cords and out my mouth before I had a chance to pat it down and make sure it wasn’t going to jab anyone. I’d been this way since I’d stopped taking Auracel and Seconal over a month ago. Here I thought I’d been mellowing all these years, when really, it had just been the drugs.

The book is just so crisply written and kept me totally engrossed the whole time.

I’ll just mention that we don’t get much of the outside story arc in this book.  We learn that Vic’s old partner Lisa is still in the Psy training facility in California, but other than that there is not much outside the personal stuff with Victor and Jacob and the immediate case.  So this book puts things in a tiny bit of a holding pattern before the events of the larger storyline pick up again.

Really I have nothing bad to say here. I love this series and I love this book and I think you all need to be reading it.  Now that I have picked this one up again, it is all I can do not to drop everything else and finish rereading the series (the first time through I read them all in a week because I couldn’t put them down). So really a fabulous book and I can’t wait to read more.

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