ARC Review- Future Perfect

From Goodreads: What if today is 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.

Oh this is such an interesting book. It siting in that really interesting uncanny valley of the near future. It takes place in a world where technology is just that one step further one than our own, where out smart home appliances are smarter, with a bit more predictive capacity, where delivery drones are common place, where we have gone back to messenger pigeons but they are machines and not birds. Driverless cars, technology driven shopping all, predictive algorithms from everything from love lives to crime to the probability of death that day. It encapsulates both the great advance of technology and creates a slightly creepy dystopia. I really enjoyed this, it really does leave you with that weird and creepy feeling when things are just a little too close for comfort. It adds to the atmosphere of the book immensely.

It is one of those books that is probably being slightly miss-marketed. I came across it being promoted as a Sci-fi based police procedural/thriller. It leans far more heavily towards the Thriller, the sci-fi elements are extremely light and extremely recognisable so if you are not a sci-fi fan you will probably enjoy this regardless. Sci-fi fans maybe might be left a little disappointed as it doesn’t quiet reach far enough towards future tech for me to be a satisfying sci-fi read.

I have to admit I do wish there were slightly fewer perspectives. The narrative voice between each one didn’t feel that clear cut to me and while the layout of each chapter helped distinguish between all three future perspectives. I found myself a little bored with Alexander and Viola’s perspective, they didn’t seem completely necessary, there aspects of the story for the most part could have been told within Christian’s perspective. Christian’s perspective which gave us the police procedural aspects and those that took us back in time to Montana and Manhattan were far more interesting to me. It was really interesting to see the unfolding of past events and how they they slowly unfolded there links to events of the future. This is the really interesting and really hooked me into the plot, more so than the sci-fi aspects.

Overall this was a really well crafted Thriller, that for me was a page turner. I could easily see this being translated into a gritty blue toned BBC drama as that is what it feels like while reading, I think anyone that loves a good police procedural with a darker edge.