Rose, M.J.: The Reincarnationist

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A terrorist bombing in Rome leaves one man dead and photojournalist Josh Ryder haunted. He begins to experience vivid waking dreams in which he lives snatches of experience from other men's lives--or perhaps from his own previous lives. Most compelling to him are the experiences of Julius, a pagan priest whose doomed love affair with a Vestal Virgin plays out against a backdrop of religious conflict. Josh also spends time in the shoes of a certain Percy Talmage, who lived in New York in the late 19th century, in a building now occupied by Josh's employer, an organization that researches reincarnation. While investigating a mystery connected with recent discoveries at an archaeological dig in Rome, Josh comes to understand that his life is inextricably bound with those of Julius and Percy, and that the past casts a long shadow over the present.

M.J. Rose, the author of eight previous novels, weaves a complicated story in The Reincarnationist, unraveling a mystery across millennia and multiple lives. The narrative might have been more tightly constructed: there are questions left unanswered and characters who seem important but melt away; the subplot of Rebecca Palmer, whose hallucinatory experiences of past lives intersect with Josh's and prove so important to the plot, is forgotten about for a long stretch of the story. But the book is quite suspenseful in parts, and it has the great advantage of ending well, which is to say that the denouement is fitting but neither predictable nor easy.