CONSTANCE

A human clone’s struggle to solve the mystery of her own existence brings her up against a brace of ruthless adversaries.

When she died in 2040, Constance D’Arcy was your typical mixed-race remote nonprofit worker who’d been lucky enough to survive the car crash that put her lover, Zhi Duan, in a coma and killed two other members of Awaken the Ghosts, the band whose guitarist she was. Now, in an ironic slap at her own name, she awakens from the monthly memory download she’d put off for a year and a half and finds herself somehow dead and resurrected as a clone, free of her tattoos, the aches and pains from the accident, and every trace of her memory from the past 18 months. The cloning procedure, pioneered by Palingenesis, the company Con’s aunt, Abigail Stickling, co-founded with angel investor Vernon Gaddis, is ordinarily reserved for the very wealthy, but Abigail had made Con a present of her own clone and arranged for her to have regular downloads of her memory to ease the transition if the clone needed to be activated. So what has Con been doing for those lost 18 months? Why are Gaddis and Dr. Brooke Fenton, his successor as Palingenesis CEO, so intent on accessing the knowledge locked in her brain—knowledge she can’t summon up herself? Most important, is there any limit to the bottomless complications FitzSimmons keeps revealing to make Con’s predicament more and more agonizing whenever she and her readers think they’ve finally gotten the lay of the land?

A super-brainy high-concept dystopian tale guaranteed to reward anyone who’s in the mood.