The 22 Murders of Madison May

I was not familiar with any of Max Barry's earlier works but was intrigued by the premise of this one. When we first meet Madison May, she is a real estate agent trying to sell a run-down house in Queens to a potential buyer--a reasonably attractive guy if a little unkempt. But then he proceeds to tell her that he's not from this world, that they have met before, and that he loves her--and then he kills her. Political reporter Felicity Staples get assigned to cover the story since the crime reporter is off having a nooner with one of his co-workers. There is a strange symbol left on the wall of the room where Maddie was murdered and Felicity notices the same symbol on the hat of a bystander who appears in one of the photos taken at the crime scene. With help from a colleague, the symbol is traced to a juice company. No one thinks this strange except Felicity. On her way home, this same bystander appears on the platform, hands her a gray egg-shaped object and pushes her off the platform. She survives by hiding in a cavity beside the tracks, but when she emerges, the world is slightly different than the one she left. Her long-time boyfriend now cooks, she has only one cat instead of two, the clock hanging annoyingly over her desk in the news room is gone, etc. But in this slightly altered world, Maddie May gets murdered again, only this time she's a TV weather reporter. Her killer is pursuing her across parallel universes trying to find the Maddie he fell in love with and killing all the ones who don't quite meet his expectations. Felicity is determined to stop him. This is definitely a mind-bending read and I have to admit that it took me a while to engage with the characters, but half-way through, I knew I had to finish. 

Kirkus calls this a "...very clever, unpredictable little murder mystery with some bittersweet tones about the things we do for love."Publishers Weekly has a somewhat lower opinion of what they describe as a "middling SF thriller" and they conclude "Barry fails to make Felicity’s response to her mind-bending situation psychologically plausible." I guess I would agree that the idea was better than the execution.