For those who like books with clever twists and turns, this rather unique murder mystery will prove most entertaining.

Taking place in the near future, it follows five women who were victims of a serial killer and whose cells were then cloned by a government “Replication Commission” from their dead bodies so they could live again. One of these women, Louise, called Lou, narrates the story. She goes into great detail about the cognitive disorientation that came not only from the circumstances causing and resulting from her “rebirth” but also from having lost most of her memories of the last few weeks leading up to her murder.

Prior to the incident, Lou, 32, was married to Silas with a new baby, Nova, now nine months old following Lou’s three months in the hospital being regenerated. The new Lou is confused - she discovers a hidden bag in the closet that the original Lou had packed, apparently intending to leave home, but she doesn’t know why. Silas is a loving husband but Lou does remember that she had postpartum blues - could that account for it?

She attends a weekly support group for the regenerated women, explaining:

“There were the five of us in the survivors’ group: Angela, Jasmine, Lacey, Fern, and myself. That name was a lie. None of us had survived.”

She understands that as a young mother, her particular case helped create sufficient public outcry to convince the Replication Commission to bring these women back from the dead, among all the other possible choices.

In Lou’s world, many people escape reality by playing virtual reality games. Lou’s job in fact involves entering a VR setting and providing virtual hugs for paying clients. After a short time, Silas breaks the news to Lou that there is a new very popular “true-crime” VR game that takes players through the serial killings that involved Lou. All of the women in her group can’t resist playing it, even though the point of it seems to be to instill fear in women and turn violence against women into a game - indeed, into a popular pastime with a cult-like following particularly among young VR aficionados. Lou hadn’t previously played true-crime VRs or even read murder mysteries. She said: “I didn’t need to make sense of violence done to strangers by strangers. People were inscrutable and life was chaos; if I knew anything, I knew that.” But she too becomes addicted to the game; she desperately wants to understand what happened to her.

As the story progresses, Lou wonders more and more about the circumstances surrounding her life and the people with whom she is closest. Eventually, she comes to doubt she was one of the women murdered by the serial killer. But if not him, then who? Could it have been her husband, often the prime suspect in the murder of a wife? Lou is unsure and yet, she muses:

“How well can you know someone? Really know someone? That is one of the questions of marriage. The question maybe. Some people argue that attraction requires not knowing someone, requires the blank spaces, the dark corners, the soft focus on the lens. Mystery is essential, they say. Mystery. Well, I was in one of those right now, and I couldn’t say that I liked it very much.”

She thought further, ”How well do you know yourself? That is the other question of marriage.”

Her questions finally lead to answers after some pretty big twists at the end of the book, that follow one after the other like scattershot.

Discussion: Williams embeds a number of serious themes in her speculative murder mystery: the lure and endurance of misogyny and public fascination with violence; the puzzlement of marriage and actually knowing another person; the conflicting emotions of early motherhood with its overwhelming uncertainties, insecurities, and the way it changes a woman’s identity; and the question of government control over life and death [whether overtly through a futuristic "commissions" or analogously through the more latent process we now have in which poverty, geographic "medical deserts," and access to affordable insurance make a difference] - who gets to decide? On what basis? She also manages to weave in snippets of observations worth considering on the nature of women’s friendships; what loving fatherhood look like [a nice counterpoint to the theme of violent men]; and the dichotomy between accepting rumors, innuendos, and promulgated “facts”, versus the wisdom of investigating on your own and entertaining“an entire crowd’s worth of perspectives in [your] head.”

Evaluation: I was impressed with the creativity of the plot as well as the quality of the writing. Unlike many whodunnits in which the only question is who committed the crime, this book is an excellent choice for book clubs with so much to consider and discuss. ( )

Promised Much, Delivered Little

I was attracted to this book by its title, 'My Murder'. As a fan of crime novels, non-fiction and fiction, I took it to read, intrigued as to how the main character, whom I assumed was murdered, could reflect on his/her own murder.

It's opening sentence, 'I was supposed to be getting dressed for the party, the first since my murder' promised an enthralling storyline. The descriptions of the actions of the main character are good and generally well written at the beginning and, so I read the first few chapters with interest and gusto.

However, by the middle of the book, I was starting to get a little bored and frustrated. There seemed to be a lot of 'maybe's and 'if's and 'but's going round in my mind as I read, somewhat disbelievingly in the characters, plot and place being described, and I found myself skim reading at an alarming pace. The writing became laboured and inconsequential to the point where the tension, usually created by a 'murder mystery', was lost.

The events take place in a futuristic age where scientific developments have reached the almost 'Blade Runner' style era, but with none of the intrigue and wonder that that film/story has. The characters, however, are not futuristic at all...they seem rather ordinary and one dimensional. I also felt there were too many of them, milling in and out of the action and too much unnecessary description of places and events which took away from the main plot (which I still couldn't fathom).

I found I didn’t care about the main character’s murder; I just couldn't take to her at all and the ending (which I won't spoil) was, for me, thoroughly disappointing I'm afraid. So this is why I only gave this book 2 stars. ( )

This wasn't the cute/quirky novel that its marketing led me to believe it would be. Yes, it does have a clone of a murdered woman trying to fill in the blanks in her memory about her predecessor's death and yes there are secrets to be uncovered but 'My Murder' is far from being a cosy mystery or a zany piece of speculative fiction exploring the possibilities and problems of cloning. It's much more interesting than that.

'My Murder' is an original, surprising, beautifully written and often unsettling novel about a woman trying to discover?/build? her own identity and gain agency in a world in which male violence against women is so ubiquitous it seems elemental. It's not a polemic. It's a compelling personal journey, told in the first-person, from the point of view of Lou (wife, mother, murder victim, clone) who is haunted by the sense that her life is inauthentic and that she is missing the information she needs to make herself real.

The landscape of Lou's journey is party shaped by lies, violence and deceit but it also contains friendship and bravery and hope.

The plot uses 'five-minutes-in-the-future' technology around cloning, Virtual Reality and Gaming but in a way that takes that technology for granted rather than either relishing it or making it problematic.

I was pulled into the novel immediately by Lou's interior voice which is quietly but increasingly unsettling. The gap between her calm, reflective tone and the content of her thoughts creates a kind of low-level dissonance. It's unsettling to hear her tell me that she knows that her husband doesn't like her calling her before-she-was-murdered-and-cloned self 'Your-first-wife" and calling her that anyway because she can't stop herself. It's more unsettling to suspect that in reality, Lou doesn't want to stop herself and then to wonder what that means.

Lou's first-person account is enriched by turns of phrase and metaphors that are used to develop an estranged-from-her-own-life view of Lou rather than being self-conscious literary flourishes.

I found Lou engaging and quickly became invested in her well-being but that didn't make being in her head any easier, Lou's habitual honesty is not a comfortable thing to observe. It's not that she always tells the truth to others that is unsettling but rather that her observations about her own behaviour are intimate in their details but detached in tone, as if she is both specimen and observer. It's a discomforting mix of insight without agency that's disquieting andnot quite human.

'My Murder' is studded with little insights into being human that sit like cat's eye markers in the middle of a dark road: how women form friendships; how trying to explain our impulses feels like making up a story rather than admitting that we don't know why we did something beyond knowing that, in that moment, we chose to do it; how who we are is both mutable and unchanging, Each insight felt valid and illuminating and yet I felt that the cat's eyes weren't marking a path towards empathy and intimacy but documenting alienation.

I admired how Katie Williams used the mystery around Lou's murder to give the story constant forward motion and continuous tension, without turning making solving the puzzle the centre of the book. I saw Lou's investigation as a plough cutting through her history and unearthing all kinds of things as she went along.

I also admired her ability to create moments of high tension. Lou's visit with the imprisoned serial killer and the time she spent in the virtual reality game based on the serial killer's murders that allowed players to be either killer or victim were vivid and memorable.

The relationships between Lou and the other clones of the serial killer's victims were complex and surprising but they felt authentic.

The murder mystery is a good one. It kept me guessing and I believed the resolution.

I know some reviewers have been unhappy with the ending but it worked for me and it was preceded by a journey that I found compelling and stimulating.

I think Katie Williams is a talent to watch. I'll be there for her next book. ( )

Mystery with a twist that 5 victims are cloned and brought back to life, and sort out more complexities of their murders and their new lives. ( )

I really wished I liked this book more. The concept is absolutely amazing. I love a speculative fiction - maybe this is a little bit beyond that though since people can be brought back to life. But I feel like the "action" didn't start until about page 160 and then I flew through the end. The beginning sucked me in though because I was trying to figure out what was going on. SPOILER: I still don't quite understand how she was able to be cloned without having her original body since the whole twist is that her original person is still alive and they made it look like she was killed. I also read this a few weeks ago, so maybe those details just escaped me or I missed them? Interesting concept. I wouldn't say don't read it, because it is good and has a good twist and I love the speculative aspect of it. Her job was so creative, like a VR therapist, that is there to just sit with a person or hold them. Very interesting! ( )