My Murder

April 17, 2023
Williams (Tell the Machine Goodnight) delivers a clever speculative story of cloning and crime. Lou is told by a government-sponsored “replication commission” that she’s been cloned from a victim of serial killer Edward Early. With no memories of her earlier life as the doting mother and loving wife she believes herself to be, she attempts to pick up where the old Lou left off in her suburban Michigan home. Lou and replicants of Early’s other four victims meet in a support group, where they dish on the difficulties of their readjustments: they have no memory of their murders, and they distance themselves from their pre-murder personae as “my other me.” Lou, in particular, is puzzled by unexplained mysteries about her pre-clone life—turns out the old Lou’s marriage wasn’t so sunny after all—that are exacerbated after she visits Early in prison. Though she meets him in hopes he’ll explain why he picked her, his bombshell revelation is much more than what she bargained for, and it leads to a surprising denouement. Though the tone is darkly comic, Williams poses provocative questions about cloning and resurrection, and she pulls off an intelligent murder mystery to boot. This creep-fest is acerbic and disturbing in equal measure.

Starred review from June 9, 2023

In the near-future of this speculative story, Louise is still acclimating to her new life. She is one of five women who were murdered by a serial killer and brought back to life as a clone. She is in a similar body, although less physically scarred, and has all the memories of her previous life except for the murder and a short time before it. Louise attends weekly support group sessions with the other murder victims and tries to be a good wife and mother to her baby. She's also back at her job, offering virtual reality therapy. When she has the opportunity to meet with her murderer, however, she learns more than expected, and it sends her reeling and questioning the life she was starting to settle into. Williams's (Tell the Machine Goodnight) writing is delightfully quirky, clever, and often breathtakingly observant as she chronicles Louise's past and present through her clone, who has to try to fit into a life that she mostly remembers but didn't physically live through. VERDICT Combining elements of dystopian fiction, psychological suspense, and mystery, this is a wonderfully incisive and intriguing novel that defies genres and invites contemplation. Perfect for book groups.--Melissa DeWild

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Starred review from May 15, 2023
A young wife, mother, and serial-killer victim seeks answers after she is brought back by cloning. In Williams' adult debut, Tell the Machine Goodnight (2018), a Kirkus Prize finalist, the author cleverly conjured a near future in which technology could both remove us from and deliver us back to ourselves and one another. With this suspenseful, smart sophomore effort--a briskly paced story with charming characters at its core--Williams again imagines a near-futuristic, science-altered reality that offers an intriguing perspective on the push-pull of family and freedom. Lou, a 30-ish wife and mother of a 9-month-old daughter, whose work entails offering therapeutic hugs to people in a virtual reality setting, returns to her old life along with several other victims of a serial killer thanks to a controversial government cloning program. As Lou struggles to readjust following her murder, supported by her sweet, supportive husband, Silas, she finds herself dogged by lacunae in her memory: How, exactly, did her murder go down? What happened in the hours leading up to and just after it? And how does she, ostensibly the same woman in a replicated body, differ from the woman she was before? With other members of her serial killer survivors' group, cloned women who convene weekly to process their emotions and experiences, Lou goes in search of answers. The search propels her--and us--along unpredictable paths to destinations that shed light not only on Lou's life choices, but also those we all face. Williams has delivered an intelligent, insightful murder mystery that illuminates her imagined world and our own.

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