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.
An orphan named René le Florentin is plucked from poverty to
become Catherine de
Medici’s perfumer. Traveling with the young duchessina from
Italy to France, René
brings with him a cache of secret documents from the
monastery where he was trained:
recipes for exotic fragrances and potent medicines—and a
formula for an alchemic
process said to have the potential to reanimate the dead.
In France, René becomes not only the greatest perfumer in
the country, but also the
most dangerous, creating deadly poisons for his Queen to use
against her rivals. But
while mixing herbs and essences under the light of
flickering candles, René doesn’t
begin to imagine the tragic and personal consequences for
which his lethal potions
will be responsible.
Paris, France—The Present:
A renowned mythologist, Jac L’Etoile—trying to recover from
personal heartache by
throwing herself into her work—learns of the sixteenth-
century perfumer who may have
been working on an elixir that would unlock the secret to
immortality. She
becomesobsessed with René le Florentin’s work—particularly
when she discovers the
dying breaths he had collected during his lifetime.
Jac’s efforts put her in the path of her estranged lover,
Griffin North, a linguist
who has already begun translating René le Florentin’s
mysterious formula. Together
they confront an eccentric heiress in possession of a world-
class art collection, a
woman who has her own dark purpose for the elixir . . . for
which she believes the
ends will justify her deadly means.
This mesmerizing gothic tale zigzags from the violent days
of Catherine de Medici’s
court to twenty-first-century France. Fiery and lush, set
against deep, wild forests
and dimly lit chateaus, The Collector of Dying Breaths
illuminates the true path to
immortality: the legacies we leave behind.
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