Is a person's last breath sacred? Jac L'Etoile and René le Florentine are on separate quests in different time periods to answer this very question. René is Catherine de Medici's perfumer and is on a quest that his mentor first started. He collects the last breath of someone dying and saves it, hoping to create an elixir that will allow the person to be reanimated. Jac is a modern day woman who sees visions of past lives she has lived and is now grieving the loss of her brother, Robbie. A last request by Robbie to seek out Melinoe Cypros sends Jac to Barbizon, France, where the past and present collide.

THE COLLECTOR OF DYING BREATHS is the sixth book in M.J. Rose's Reincarnationist series. There are several story arcs that are concluding in this book and therefore I would suggest at least reading the two books prior to THE COLLECTOR OF DYING BREATHS first. While THE COLLECTOR OF DYING BREATHS weaves back and forth between the time of Catherine de Medici and modern day, the modern day scenes are a bit more difficult to follow initially due to the references to events in past books.

At its core, THE COLLECTOR OF DYING BREATHS is a story of love, obsession, and the quest for immortality. Jac has recently suffered an unexpected loss, and her grief has her searching for ways to recapture time with her brother. René is also searching for a way to use the last breath of a human to reanimate the dead. Their grief is pervasive throughout the storyline as M.J. Rose does a marvelous job at capturing just how far someone will go to spend one last moment with a loved one.

I love stories with Catherine de Medici and found the aspects of THE COLLECTOR OF DYING BREATHS featuring both her and her perfumer, René, quite fascinating. In fact, I had to restrain myself from skipping over Jac's story to get to René's story! M.J. Rose makes the art of perfumes and fragrances exciting as she shows readers the power scent has to trigger attraction, memory, and even that of life and death.