Length 235 pages
Format ebook
Published 2018
Series Detective Barnes #1
My Copy provided by the publisher
Punishment introduces a cool concept into the dark world of crime fiction; a machine which enables law enforcement to temporarily transpose the dying memories of murder victims into their own corpus of memories. The criminals in the fictional (future?) world have acclimatized to this new wave of policing and now wear masks to hide their identity, which means good old fashioned policing is still paramount to catching a killer.
In Punishment, a killer is terrorizing the populace and taunting the police by brutally murdering unsuspecting and seemingly random victims with a pick axe and leaving cryptic clues at the murder scene for the likes of Detective Barnes and his partner Franklin to decipher.
This is an inventive book which not only introduces some cool tech into the crime fictional realm but also provides the real world implications of such technology on the open market; b-grade celebs selling memories, prostitutes selling weird and wonderful experiences at a price, and addicts known as munkey's who can't get enough. And the perhaps the best part of the 'machine', the ghost memories which live on in those who experience the transference.
The criminal element itself is pretty straight forward serial killer and the protagonist conforms to the tried and true genre troupes, however, these are both a positive and complimentary to the complexities introduced by the technology.
My rating: 5/5 stars. This is a great start to a new series featuring a troubled Detective who himself looks like being on the brink of sanity - I mean, how long can someone function with a bunch of murdered peoples dying memories? One of the top new books of 2018.
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