Future Perfect by Felicia Yap

 When a model is killed and several high-profile guests injured at a prestigious Manhattan fashion event showcasing the work of designer Alexander King, the race is on to catch the perpetrator before they can strike again - at a second show due to take place in London.

Police Commisioner Christian Verger has other worries on his mind though - his fiancee, Viola, has left after an argument, and his i-predict horoscope app is warning that he has 99.74% chance of dying that day. Maybe if he can catch the killer, he'll reduce those odds?  Meanwhile, unknown to Christian, Viola is working on hunting the bomber too, using a piece of software she's been developing to identify potential criminals - unfortunately the program points its finger firmly at Alexander King's close associates. 

Set in the not-too-distant future, Future Perfect is a cleverly-plotted who-dunnit, with flashbacks to the troubled life of a teenager in Montana interleaving with the current day police hunt. 

The flashback sequences work really well. They tell the backstory of one of the main characters, without stating which one, and, of course, lead the reader to try to guess who it is and how their story fits with the attack on King.

It wasn't as futuristic as I'd imagined it would be (I'd half-expected something closer to Minority Report) so although set in 2030 it's nearer to the crime sector of genre fiction than it is to sci-fi.  In many ways I found the story-telling reminiscent of a classic detective novel in which the crime is solved by interviewing suspects, and spotting the weak link in their account of their actions, rather than relying on cyber ware. There are various tech-y advances - bird-shaped delivery drones (rather like mechanized versions of Harry Potter's owl postal service), Viola's criminal-catching software, the i-predict horoscope app which foretells the day's events with uncanny accuracy - but these don't take over the story.

Yesterday by Felicia Yap

review by Maryom

A body has been found in the river by Grantchester meadows. The coat pockets laden with pebbles point to suicide; the bump on the head says otherwise. So the police begin investigations - but things are tricky in a world where the majority of people can only remember the events of yesterday, and the pressure is on for a speedy resolution.


This book starts with an interesting premise - that most adults only retain memories of the previous day, the lucky few remember two days - then throws in a murder mystery, but it soon lost its hold on me as it turned into a fairly predictable domestic noir.
 Although the book isn't promoted as such, I'd expected a more 'sci-fi' take to the story. After all, a whole population coping with memory problems like that would surely be really weird. How did it develop in the first place? How do people cope from day to day? Would staying awake for long periods (perhaps with the help of drugs) keep someone's memory intact or is time the factor that governs this strange condition? And how can you hope to solve a murder when the facts will start to slip away from witnesses' minds at the end of the day? The aspects which intrigued me most weren't addressed as the book is much more murder mystery than speculative fiction, and as for coping day to day, well that's solved by the use of diaries - filled in every night to make sure important events and feelings are remembered, and read every morning to convert 'memories' into 'facts' which are never forgotten. To be honest, I felt these characters probably had a better grasp of what happened last week, by referring to their diaries, than I have with only a memory to count on!
I also found it a bit bizarre that events took place in what feels like a familiar setting, Granchester Meadows - I half expected Sidney Chambers and his entourage to show up and help solve the mystery!
If you're reading this as another domestic noir, you'll probably like it well enough, but I'm not particularly fond of the genre, and, comparing it to other fiction involving memory loss, Yesterday didn't have the tension of SJ Watson's Before I Go to Sleep, total world immersion of Emily Barr's The One Memory of Flora Banks or the grittiness of the Christopher Nolan film Momento.




Maryom's review - 3 stars
Publisher - Wildfire 
Genre - domestic noir, adult fiction