Review by Booklist Review
July 4 is not a good day for Hallie Evers. She's fired from a job for the third time in a year. Her boyfriend breaks up with her. She loses her apartment. Oh, and she dies. Cardiac arrest at the age of 29. Then things get weird as well as bad. Hallie wakes up in a hospital bed (after her death, remember) with someone else's memories in addition to her own, and some of those new memories involve a murder. Before all this happened, Hallie was about as messed up as someone can be, dealing with drug and alcohol abuse, battling bulimia, even attempting suicide. So, naturally, she has to wonder if any of this is even real, or whether she's imagining all of it? And how can she find out? Readers familiar with Freeman's work (see, for example, the Jonathan Stride series) will expect a tightly plotted thriller with solidly realized characters, and they won't be disappointed. Well-conceived and suspenseful.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Gifted freelance writer Hallie Evers, the narrator of this intriguing thriller from bestseller Freeman (Infinite), has the mother of all bad days. Her sarcastic response to an ill-considered ad slogan for a prosthetic implant to treat impotence has gotten her fired from a med-tech firm, and her boyfriend's dumped her for her best friend and roommate--which also leaves her without a place to live. That evening, at a party in Las Vegas, the combination of alcohol and a snort of cocaine stops her heart before Reed Smith, a doctor at the party, restarts it. But her return to life is accompanied by some unusual phenomena. Hallie feels that her head is "crowded," dreams of being covered in blood, and has memories that aren't hers. When she speaks with Reed, Hallie is troubled that he seems to expect her to have experienced some odd things. The puzzle deepens, and Hallie comes to suspect that she's somehow gotten another person's memories, including witnessing a murder. Freeman keeps the twists coming, though the ending will strain some readers' credulity beyond the breaking point. Fans of Crichtonesque medical thrillers will be entertained. Agent: Deborah Schneider, Gelfman Schneider/ICM Partners. (Aug.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Fasten your seatbelts. Fiendish Freeman has engineered another peerlessly bumpy ride. It's not until after the worst Fourth of July imaginable--her boss fires her, her boyfriend texts to dump her for her roommate, and she's pronounced dead after drinking and fighting too much at a reception--that Las Vegas copywriter Hallie Evers' real problems kick in. When she wakes up some time after Dr. Reed Smith, another guest at the reception, miraculously restarts her heart, she starts being plagued by vivid, disturbing dreams that feel "more like memories…someone else's memories." She has vivid, detailed recollections of Boston, a city she's never visited. The name of Tyler Reyes, the founding CEO of Boston-based medical device developer Hyppolex, seems as familiar as if they'd met, despite the fact that they clearly haven't. Her dreams about the death of a young woman named Savannah make her feel as if this is her sister, though she's an only child. A pair of assailants nearly kidnap her before they're run off, and Todd Kivel, the private eye who appears out of nowhere to rescue her, gets killed for his trouble. Clearly Hallie's being tracked by unknown parties plotting some deeper game, and many readers will figure out what that game is before Freeman confirms their suspicions. But this big reveal isn't the climax; it's only the pivot to a new set of mysteries Hallie steps into when she leaves Las Vegas for Boston and begins to sense what an extravagant set of crimes, past and present, underlie the dreams that don't feel like dreams at all. Wheels within wheels within wheels, cunningly intermeshed by a master who sweats every nightmarish detail. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
