Felicity Staples is a reporter for a paper in New York, but she mostly covers boring stuff like politics. As fate would have it, one day she gets called out to a crime scene when the normal crime beat guy is busy, and she is shaken to her core by the senseless slaying of a young real estate agent, one Madison May.
Felicity is a reporter, after all, so she works not only the crime scene, but also starts digging into Madison's background. The clues lead her to a company called Soft Horizon Juice Company and a man named Hugo Garrelly, who also happened to be standing outside of the crime scene staring at the house. While chasing down clues, she spies Garrelly coming out of the Soft Horizon building, and she follows him, only to discover from Levi, the crime beat reporter, that Garrelly is wanted for the murder of his wife and has escaped from Sing Sing prison. Of course, she follows him into the subway, but then she realizes he is following another man, Clayton Hors, the man Madison May was meeting at the house she died in, and her presumed murderer. Then a crazy thing happens - Garrelly asks for her help in holding onto an object for him, hands her what appears to be a stone egg, tells her to hide in the cavity below, and then coldly pushes her onto the tracks of an incoming train. While she survives the passing train with only scratches and bruises, things aren't quite right when she emerges.
For starters, when she calls Levi to tell him what happened, he has no knowledge of the murder she was covering, nor of Hugo Garrelly and Clayton Hors, the wanted men she saw on the subway. When she gets home, her loving boyfriend Gavin is there, but one of her cats seems to be missing, as in, they never had him. Then the freakiest thing happens - Felicity sees a headline where Madison May has been murdered, but she is a student killed in an alley near her home. When she (and others) start to question her sanity, she goes to the hospital and is visited by Hugo and he wants his egg back. He then drops the bomb on her that she traveled to a multiverse and she can never return to her old life. She simply disappeared in that world and when she entered this world, the existing Felicity Staples was erased and she took her place. Felicity can either make it work in this world or hold onto Hugo's egg and try again in another, so what does she decide? Having had her life ripped out from under her, she is determined to stop Clay Hors once and for all and save the other Madison Mays. Whether she'll work for or against Hugo and his allies at Soft Horizon, well, that is left to be seen.
I loved that the chapters would jump between Felicity and what was happening with her, to Maddie May in her various iterations. Sometimes she's an actress, sometimes a student, sometimes a real estate agent, but always Clay Hors' obsession and victim, at least until Felicity steps in to try and stop him. The 22 Murders of Madison May is an absolutely brilliant thriller by Max Barry and one that I tore through in a handful of sittings. It should definitely be your next summer read and Max Barry will now be on my permanent radar. If you have nerdly inclinations and love a good serial killer book, this one is for you. Highly, highly recommended.
