Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty (2017)
Intriguing idea poorly executed
Book cover blurb
A LONE SHIP. A MURDERED CREW. AND A CLONE WHO MUST FIND HER OWN KILLER - BEFORE THEY STRIKE AGAIN.
It’s not common to wake up in a cloning vat streaked with drying blood.
Maria Arena has been cloned before. But never like this. Usually when she awakens in a new body, her first memory is of how she died. This time, she has no idea. Her memories are incomplete.
And Maria isn’t the only one to have died recently…
My Review
This wasn't what I was expecting. Wait, that's not quite right. It was what I was expecting just not the way I was expecting it.
This is a very intelligent construction with some fantastic ideas but the execution and writing just didn't hit the mark for me. The prose read like a first novel and there were some glaring typos the copy editor should be shot for missing. There was no real finesse to the wordplay, a lot of it being clumsy and even repetitive.
The whole 'whodunnit?' aspect of the story got a little confusing to the point that at the end of the book, where we had the whole exposition of the explanation, I just found myself not really caring all that much.
The mindmap hacking element of the story was fascinating and I wish we could have had more of that. The same goes for IAN, the ship's AI. He was the most interesting character on the ship. I would have preferred him to have a bigger role and been more 'responsible' for some of the bad things going on, that would have made for such compelling reading.
Did I enjoy the book? I very much enjoyed elements of it, but I spent a lot of my reading time thinking "oh, let's have more of those enjoyable elements please." Which I don't think has happened to me on such a noticeable scale before.
Oh, and the subheading on the cover which includes 'One killer' is hugely inaccurate and personally very annoying.
My copy of this novel
Orbit paperback edition.
Published in 2017
361 pages
ISBN 9780316389686