The writing style was brilliant. The book skipped along in a really fun way and the author had a nice lighthearted touch, which is quite something considering the book is about Denton’s impending death! There was a lot of dialogue - I don’t know anything about the author, but maybe he’s a screenwriter because it flowed really well and had a lot of humour.
I liked the characters well enough - Denton and Paulo had a really fun bromance going on and the banter between them made me laugh on numerous occasions. The girls were a little bit more one-dimensional, but they were okay.
The biggest issue I had was that the plot doesn’t really seem to do much. We’re introduced to Denton at the beginning and told about the whole death date thing and we find out fairly soon in that Denton is going to die in the next couple of days. All good. From then on, we’re just kind of watching and waiting for him to die. Or not. There’s plenty of humour thrown in, but it just ends up feeling like a sitcom; the situation being ‘Will Denton die?’ and the comedy being gags about getting high and shagging people’s sisters.
The other problem I had, and one I didn’t really manage to get over, was the whole concept of being able to tell when someone is going to die based on their DNA sample. It just didn’t work for me. I could get on board with the concept of using someone’s DNA to deduce their death date from natural causes - heart disease, cancer, old age - but in this book DNA is also used to predict your death date from random acts - stray gunshots, car crashes and so on.
It throws the whole concept of chaos theory out of the window and I could never really get my head round it. I’d have been happier if the author had said, ‘they do it with magic’, or ‘they found an old druid in a cave in darkest Wales who can do precognition’.
If I could have made that leap of logic, I would have enjoyed this book a whole lot more, but it just didn’t work for me.
I wouldn’t say ‘don’t read this book’; the writing is fun and it’s really readable, but the plot and the concept just left me scratching my head a bit.
3 stars