Death of a Clone, Alex Thompson
Received to review via Netgalley
This has been out for, um, ages now. I did actually start it as soon as I got it, and then I had my dissertation and moving and a thousand other excuses. When I actually sat down to finish it, though, it’s a very easy read and went by quickly. It was a little bit predictable to me, but it comes together nicely, and I do enjoy the constant references to Golden Age crime fiction (or at least Agatha Christie; now I think about it, I’m not sure whether any others were mentioned).
I probably shouldn’t say too much about it for fear of spoiling the reveals — it is kind of fun to just read and let things fall into place for yourself, after all. But I do find it weird that it has a lot of similarities with another recent book, One Way (S.J. Morden). There’s a slightly different angle, but nonetheless a lot of similarities, right down to the ending (which I peeked at in the case of One Way, which I haven’t quite finished). If I remember rightly they must have been being published at the same time, so it’s not a matter of plagiarism — just a kind of synchronicity, I think, but it definitely gave me deja vu!
Not bad, but nothing particularly astonishing either.
It happened to me sometimes as well. I would read a book and think: I’ve read it before. And then I would remember that it was another author. Usually such books appear at the same time too.
I’m speculating, but I think the two authors with similar books might have gone to the same workshop (where they group-workshopped the same story), or took a class from the same instructor, or something like that, and afterwards transformed their notes into novels. Different but similar.