Infinite

Chicago events manager Dylan Moran, the protagonist of this imaginative psychological thriller from Thriller Award winner Freeman (Thief River Falls), is haunted by the recent death of his wife, who drowned when he accidentally drove their car into a river on a weekend away from the city. When Dylan begins to catch unexplained glimpses of himself wherever he goes, he's initially convinced they're merely side effects of the accident. He decides to consult a psychiatrist and self-help guru, Eve Brier, because her picture looks vaguely familiar. Eve claims to have been treating him with an experimental therapy based on the theory that every choice a person makes creates an alternate universe where events follow a different path. She suggests he's encountering his doppelgänger from an alternate reality. Then people close to Dylan turn up dead, and he realizes his double is a serial killer. Assisted by Eve, he sets out to stop him. The result is a tense, fast-paced chase through alternate realities. Clever plotting matches the well-developed characters. Freeman is sure to win new fans with this page-turner. Agent: Deborah Schneider, Gelfman Schneider/ICM Partners. (Mar.)

Even fans used to the wild inventions of Freeman's thrillers, such as Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Evolution (2020), had better buckle their seat belts for this traversal of a troubled man's alternate identities. As if it weren't enough to lose his wife, realtor Karly Chance, to a car accident he swam away from, Chicago hotel events manager Dylan Moran is jolted even more by seeing his double watching him from the riverbank. After he spots another version of himself wearing the bloodstained jacket his father had worn when he shot Dylan's mother and himself and he learns that construction worker Scotty Ryan, the one-night stand Karly had been desperately trying to apologize for when she died, has been stabbed to death, he reaches out to psychiatrist Eve Brier, a stranger who's giving a lecture at his hotel and yet insists that he's been seeing her professionally since the death of his best friend, Roscoe Tate, in another car crash that introduced Dylan to Karly in the first place. The doubles, Eve assures him, are real enough: alternate versions of himself living alternate lives in alternate worlds that have intersected with his own. Under her direction, Dylan allows himself to be injected with a cocktail of hallucinogens that sends him rocketing into first one of those worlds, then another, determined to neutralize the most dangerous of the doppelgängers, a serial killer who's already murdered four Karly look-alikes. Each world offers him new possibilities for reversing his mistakes but also new pains, new griefs, and a deepening sense of estrangement, not only from Dylans leading increasingly nightmarish versions of his life, but from the life he thought was his. This cockeyed, suspenseful exploration of roads not taken is a dizzying delight. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.