Published 18th March 2021 by Wildfire.
From the cover of the book:
What if today was 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.
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Future Perfect is a book that had me at the blurb, and it was everything and more that I wanted it to be.
Welcome to a near future so realistic you can almost taste it! It's one not so very different from the one we know now, except with a little bit more 'helpful' technology embedded in our lives, and it is filled with just as much human frailty as we know today.
New to his post, Police Commissioner Christian Verger is having a difficult day. Not only is he unsure about his capability to do the job he has been appointed to do, he is trying to deal with the fallout of a bombing in New York that may lead to possible death and destruction at a high profile fashion show coming up in London that night, his girlfriend has left him - and Alexa insists the likelihood of him surviving to see tomorrow is remarkably small. Not great.
Events of this difficult day then play out through the eyes of various characters linked to the fashion designer Alexander King, whose model had her arm blown off on a New York catwalk, and whose event that night in London was supposed to be the pinnacle of his glittering career - and it is up to us, at the side of Christian, to put all the pieces together to track down the identity of the killer before they can strike again. To spice things up, Christian's disgruntled girlfriend, Viola, has co-incidentally been working on a computer program designed to identify the suspects of the crime, which throws up some very interesting names and has her trying to track down the killer at the same time.
As the story progresses, the backdrop moves in time between Montana of the 1980s, New York of the 1990s and the current investigation in 2030, bringing in little snippets of the past lives of some of the characters and hinting at their darkest secrets - but quite who is who, and who is hiding what is unclear, which gives a wonderful Christiesque feel to the whole piece.
The pace of the novel is perfect, and the tension builds beautifully to a delicious climax at the London fashion show, where we find out the truth behind more than one mystery - and I take my hat off to Felicia Yap for her top class skills as an author in writing a book which misdirects the reader quite as well as this. Nice one Felicia!
But this is also a high concept thriller that plays around beautifully with the notion of technology as well as messing with your head. There is nothing in this book that feels like anything that will not come along in the next few years and be accepted by the majority as something that will be a valuable addition to our modern lifestyle - however absurd. I thoroughly enjoyed the comedy that derives from situations in this book where technology seems to have the upper-hand, despite the characters' wishes.
I was also very impressed with the way Yap explores the concept of perfection in her book, which gives you quite a lot to think about, and the combination of Future and Perfect in the title is nothing short of genius.
This is an intelligent thriller with just the right amount of intrigue, excitement, and mystery, with a nice touch of friendship and romance thrown in at the same time. Felicia Yap, you have yourself a new fan!
Future Perfect is available to buy from your favourite book retailer now.
Thank you to Felicia Yap for sending me a gifted copy of this book as part of her very generous giveaway competition on Twitter.
About the author:
Felicia Yap grew up in Kuala Lumpur. She read biochemistry at Imperial College London, followed by a doctorate in history (and a half-blue in competitive ballroom dancing) at Cambridge University. She has been a radioactive-cell biologist, a war historian, a university lecturer, a technology journalist, a theatre critic, a flea-market trader and a catwalk model. Felicia's debut thriller Yesterday has been translated into multiple languages around the world. Her second novel Future Perfect will be published in spring 2021.
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