Perfection Unleashed- A Double Helix Novel by Jade Kerrion.
Might be considered YA and Science Fiction- It's also pretty good story telling.
I recently started twittering- the doctor said that if I ignore it it will go away. It was to trace some specific activities and I hadn't thought to get too involved. What I did do was I started getting some interesting leads into reading material. Mostly in the form of- gentle- spam.
What that yielded was a pretty good read.
The story starts with Zara and this line:
[quote] On another Friday night, she might have been out at a Georgetown bar, accepting drinks from attractive men and allowing them to delude themselves into imagining that they might be the lucky one to take her home.[/quote]
Kerrion, Jade (2012-06-23). Perfection Unleashed (Book 1 of the Double Helix series) (p. 1). . Kindle Edition.
I know, gag me. I somehow think this line is meant to mislead- don't let it put you off. This does not even begin to describe Zara.
Zara is a mercenary and we find her working with two colleagues, a clone named Xin and a fellow mercenary named Carlos breaking into a lab where some seedy scientist, Rolland and Michael, are keeping an experiment they call Galahad--The perfect human. Zara's goal is to obtain some genetic matter from the experiment.
Things don't go quite as planned and Zara ends up taking the largest sample available--Galahad himself. This snowballs into a number of events that introduce us to a whole slew of other character that for me were just a bit hard to keep up with at first.
There's plenty of good world building inserted in the narrative to help sort things out. The world is one where there are clones and mutants- both considered sub human. Galahad seems to fall somewhere in between all this. There are even Pro humanist extremest.
Zara is not fond of mutants because of tele-paths and em-paths and its no help for her that her friend Lucian Winter brings in his own em-path, Danyael, to help them when everything goes wrong. There are other surprisinge complications to this, but you'll have to read it to find out.
The list of important characters in this story keeps building, but it all works out quite well, though at the beginning there were some moments when I lost track of whose POV I was in. The POV thing may have just been me and I got used to it quick enough that it became a non-issue.
I found a lot of familiar elements in this story. Lucian reminded me of the rich and discerning quietly helpful protagonist that always showed up in Robert Heinlein's work.
The relationship between the Pro human movement and the scientist had shades of twelve monkey's written all all over it.
The mutant and clone situation was reminiscent of X-men and other comic fiction, which may help account for the cast of thousands and many protagonists throughout.
I found many of the plot elements to be predictable while at the same time there were moments of wow when Jade takes us in another direction than expected.
The overall story is well paced and well told and even though it requires more reading in the series to resolve some of the plot issues it sticks together well into itself to satisfy.
Perfection Unleashed:
Is a great read to anyone who likes a good thriller and interesting diverse characters, lots of Science Fiction and plenty of thought provoking ethical issues.
A great beginning to a promising series of books.
J.L. Dobias