#Bookvent – Celebrating my top reads of 2021
My day six #bookvent choice is a book which is part thriller, part speculative fiction but all entertaining. I loved the originality of the author’s debut and have been waiting patiently to see how they could follow it. Entwining the worlds of technology and fashion and feeding them into a police investigation set in the not so distant future, this book is very clever and very immersive. I may not know a lot about fashion, I probably don’t know much more about technology to be fair but I know a damned good book when I see one. My day six pick is …
Future Perfect By Felicia Yap
What if today was your last day…
A bomb has exploded during a fashion show, killing a beautiful model on the catwalk. The murderer is still at large… and he may strike again. Yet this is the least of Police Commissioner Christian Verger’s worries. His fiancée Viola has left him. He has to keep his tumultuous past a secret. To make things worse, his voice assistant Alexa is 99.74% sure he will die tomorrow.
Moving from snowy 1980s Montana to chic 1990s Manhattan to a drone-filled 2030s Britain, FUTURE PERFECT is an electrifying race to solve a murder before it’s too late. Yet it is also a love story, a riveting portrait of a couple torn apart by secrets, grief and guilt. A twisted tale of how the past can haunt a person’s future and be used to predict if he will die… or kill.
We have apps for everything these days. Communication, tracking your steps, recording your diet, measuring your heart rate. Well, how would you feel about an app that provided you with statistics and probabilities. A bit like a weather forecast but instead of telling you the likelihood of snow, it gives you your percentage chances of seeing out the week. If you knew you were likely to die before the stroke of midnight the following day, how exactly would you want to spend your last few hours on earth? Would you even want to know? Well one of our central protagonists in Future Perfect really isn’t given the choice. He’s not given the chance of a duvet day and avoiding high risk either, which seems a little unfair, but is all in a day’s work for Police Commissioner Christian Verger. But it’s not just his future we are concerned with. There is also the future of his fiancé, Viola McKay, their futures and their fates inextricably linked in this complex and compelling mystery that traverses the worlds of the advanced technology, and the high fashion stage of designer, Alexander King. The book is packed with tension, glamour, mystery and intrigue. Told from a dual perspective of Christian and Viola I found myself completely immersed in two diverse worlds, both alien to me, fashion more than policing I have to admit, but both utterly fascinating. I love the way in which the author combines their stories, using her knowledge of the fashion industry to capture the mania and competitive nature of it, and mixing this with a good old fashioned police investigation. I say old fashioned, but believe me nothing about this book is old hat or traditional. It is very much set in the future and the depiction of the what is to come is scarily plausible. The language is beautifully crafted, scene setting so vivid that you feel as though you are a part of the action, and the characters so likeable that I was totally invested. Whilst the stories may to seem to be miles apart, Felicia Yap weaves them together so skilfully you don’t even really feel or see it happen. As I said in my original review this is a perfectly pitched murder mystery, with high stakes and excellent character development. It’s a story of technology, but also of humanity and of the complicated nature of relationships – friendship and love – and it is a book which kept me completely rapt from the very first page to the very last. I loved it.
You can read my review of Future Perfect right here.
Happy #bookvent reading all
Jen
Jen Med's Book Reviews 