Book Review - Matthew FitzSimmons – Constance

 

* An audio version of this review will appear on the book review Podcast Reading in Bed in early September *

Blurb:

A breakthrough in human cloning becomes one woman’s waking nightmare in a mind-bending thriller by the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of the Gibson Vaughn series.

In the near future, advances in medicine and quantum computing make human cloning a reality. For the wealthy, cheating death is the ultimate luxury. To anticloning militants, it’s an abomination against nature. For young Constance “Con” D’Arcy, who was gifted her own clone by her late aunt, it’s terrifying.

After a routine monthly upload of her consciousness—stored for that inevitable transition—something goes wrong. When Con wakes up in the clinic, it’s eighteen months later. Her recent memories are missing. Her original, she’s told, is dead. If that’s true, what does that make her?

The secrets of Con’s disorienting new life are buried deep. So are those of how and why she died. To uncover the truth, Con is retracing the last days she can recall, crossing paths with a detective who’s just as curious. On the run, she needs someone she can trust. Because only one thing has become clear: Con is being marked for murder—all over again.

Strengths:

This book is set in the near future where due to massive advances in medicine and technology cloning has now become a reality for those rich enough to afford it.

Skipping the first twenty or so pages which I’ll come onto in the weaknesses, the book really starts when Constance D’Arcy awakens in a cloned body with no memory of the past eighteen months.

The idea in this book is a really good idea and the world is set up really well, and the perils and pitfalls in this book are pretty good with the far right reglionious aspect of the book added a nice touch to the parnoid nature that the main character Conn when she literally had no idea who to trust and at one point ended up sleeping on the streets.

I also liked the fact she wasn’t immedately likeable as a character and liked the hard edgeness of her as a character and the way she didn’t take shit off anybody and didn’t let anybody stop her try to find out what has happened in those 18 months leading up to that point.

Weaknesses:

Once I got off the first twenty or pages, which I didn’t think were really needed and didn’t seem to go anyway, the book was a steady 4 stars until the last 50 pages which the story came close to losing any kind of believability where twist after twist seemed to build up which after about the third or fourth one, it came close to choking the tension off of everything after too many twists, subplots etc.

I’ll not reveal the twists that came up but I felt, one or two of the twists may have worked not three or four which perhaps the author could have held back until the second book if there was such a demand for it and cost it marks for me as this could have being a easily 9 out of 10 for me and I’ll keep off the sometimes 2d nature of a number of the male characters in this book (It’s kinda telling that the best male character dies at the end of the book and will cause the writer some problems in the second book I suspect).

Anyway, a fair enough start to a series. I’ll probably read Book 2 and despite the fact having faults, it’s the best book I’ve read on Amazon First Reads in quite some time.

7.5/10