Play Book Tag discussion

There are two central characters in Recursion: Barry Sutton, an NYPD detective, and Helena Smith, a neuroscientist in Palo Alto who studies memory. The book opens with Barry being called to the Upper West Side to help a woman threatening suicide at the Poe Building. The woman suffers from a condition called false memory syndrome in which people think that they are living the wrong life, that another timeline of existence has been overwritten in order for them to live a new one.

Helena is on the brink of finding what she hopes is a cure for Alzheimer’s. Since her mother’s diagnosis, she’s been determined to help her mother regain some of her memory before the disease takes over completely. When she was about to run out of funding from Stanford on her research, she meets Marcus Slade, who believes in what she’s doing and funds the rest of her research.

There's not much more you can say without providing major spoilers.

Crouch does a very good job of explaining the mechanics of this world. He really takes the “science” of science fiction and writes really great action-filled fiction using it. I was completely immersed while reading this book considering how confusing the science seemed at first.

Despite being classified as science fiction, it’s an action-packed novel with a some police procedural thrown in. The science wasn’t too difficult to understand. It also has human and emotional elements to it so you really cared about the characters you were reading about. "Recursion" was thought-provoking, fast-paced, had a mind-blowing plot and complex characters. I highly recommend it.