The 22 Murders of Madison May

This is a serial killer thriller hung on a science fiction framework. It feels a lot like a script treatment or a film adaptation. Maybe that's been put in my mind because so much of the book deals with Hollywood and the acting profession, but it's also because the story is all about hustling you along from scene to scene without stopping to dig into anything lest it falls apart. Barry's previous novel Lexicon had a really interesting idea at its core, one that was considered and worked through logically in the story, but this one is much more handwavey, and a lot of the character motivations and mechanics of the macguffin don't stack up when you look at them too closely. Barry raises some interesting questions about the ethics of the multiverse hopping, but then doesn't even really try to answer them.

For all that, it's a snappy and entertaining read, and if you take it on its own terms it's pacy and fun, but I wish it had tried to be a little more