📖 Novel of the Week [Halloween Edition]: Heads Will Roll by Joanie Chevalier

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Imagine not loving your body, whether it's because it doesn't reach your beauty standards or because you're in a wheelchair. Well, Doctor Stefan Frankis can (or at least thinks he can) give you what you want: a new body, literally, but not with exhausting and endless hours in the gym or with liposuction...
Kaneko, a teenage girl from Tokyo, would do anything to please her parents: she's not thin as most of her schoolmates and her mother is one of those women who seek for perfection in every aspect of their lives, so Kaneko's father, Aiko, finds out a way to give her wife what she wants...so maybe she'll stop being a pain in the a** and will start treating him with respect.
Barry Thompson, from Oakland, is forced on a wheelchair by muscular dystrophy and is desperate for a new body, a new life.
Jim, Joey, and Brett are brothers who struggle to keep the family business (funeral agency) running so when Jim hears that a company pays good money for corps he doesn't think twice, but tries to keep his brothers unaware.

By accident, Barry's and the brothers paths cross and they'll find themselves in a situation bigger than what they initially thought: Doctor Frankis wants to be famous and worldwide renowned as the first dead transplant surgeon, but his patients keep dying, so he has to perform the surgeries in a safe warehouse, provided by influential people of politics and mafia, until one of his "guinea pigs" will survive the procedure...

👍👎My Thoughts
At first I thought the novel would be something similar to sci-fi movies like "Criminal" (where memories are moved from a brain to another) or "Transcendence" (Jhonny Deep's mind is relocated in a computer) but this is not the case: the story focuses on the reasons that move the characters: greed, vanity, desperateness or wanting to please someone at all costs.

The cover may suggest that the story is creepy and weird, but (even if the medical procedure is surely questionable) it's not as 'horror' as I thought, but it gives you goosebumps reading some parts.

This is not my usual "cup of tea" when I think of sci-fi genre I think about future centuries, but setting the whole story nowadays gives the story credibility and allows the reader to dive completely in it. The only plot decision I didn't like was the introductions of new characters halfway of the book, I believe the author could have done an equally good job with the characters already in it.

My vote: 7/10

Photo credits: goodread.com

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