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1986 Science Fiction Murder Mystery

Waking up on a space station covered in someone else's blood is bad, but having lost the memory of your last ten years is worse. Your home, your job, your wife ... why you have illegal drugs in your pocket, what happened last night -- all gone. Only the dread feeling of something even more terrible about to happen in the next few days.

Rereading this almost forty years later, it holds up surprisingly well. The human elements and how people act -- especially human foibles -- are pretty solid. The motivations, as they are eventually revealed, are all entirely believable. Some of the big reveals still have enormous power, and as our hero gets ever closer to the answers, the stakes become huge.

But it does require suspension of disbelief. It was written before the internet, before cell phones, before Covid, before smartwatch assistants like Siri -- and it manages to anticipate them all, if imperfectly. There are a few things that exist today that you've got to assume they somehow get rid of in the next century or so, like cell phone tracking. Still, I'm a sucker for amnesia stories, and this one pulls you right along as our hero slowly fills in the blanks, trying to figure out if he might actually be a murderer. ( )

Had me enthralled since the first word. Only complaint is the plot was fairly obvious early on in book. ( )