This book was very interesting for me. The more that I was reading it in a hospital 😀 It is sci-fi and the story is set in the future where human personalities can be stored digitally for example after death, as an punishment etc. The personality can be then downloaded either to the same body or even to different one.
So when people die, their memories are stored and they can be downloaded to a new body (unless their cortical stack in the spine is directly damaged). The problem is that they have to go through the whole ageing process every time because updating the body to the actual age is too expensive and only very wealthy ones can afford, they keep clones of their bodies. The wealthy ones can even afford having their memories in a remote storage and they can be updated regularly. Which means that even if their stack is directly damaged or destroyed, their memories can be still downloaded from the remote storage.
One of these wealthy people is Laurens Bancroft who commits suicide an a way that his stack was destroyed. Despite his memories are downloaded back to one of his clones, he doesn’t remember the last 48 hours as that is the last time his memories were updated. He is convinced that it was not his suicide but that he was murdered.
Therefore he hires Takeshi Kovacs to investigate what exactly happened. Kovacs is former military member (Envoy) who has special training and abilities and is downloaded to a body of a policeman Elias Ryker who is currently arrested. This fact causes him several complications especially while working with a cop Kristin Ortega who was going out with Ryker before he was arrested.
The story is very complicated but sometimes easily predictable. It is also full of technical and medical explanations which sometimes were too much to follow for me. Anyway, despite these little flies in the ointment the book is very catchy, full of very interesting ideas and I liked it a lot. I give it 8/10.
Pinky Kidney 