The Next Time I Die

Jason Starr's sci-fi/crime novel The Next Time I Die starts strong, as the book's narrator (Steven Blitz, a criminal defense attorney in the middle of a celebrity murder trial) finds out his wife is leaving him, gets stabbed on the street trying to defend an innocent woman, and wakes up in the hospital to find the world circa 2020 radically changed — Al Gore is president, 9/11 never happened, Blockbuster defeated Netflix in the streaming wars, and Blitz has a six-year-old daughter he has never met. The first thirty or so pages are one of the more gripping openings I've read in recent years. Unfortunately, the rest of the story is much weaker, with contrived dialogue, poorly-developed secondary characters, and several unrealistic scenes (some of them involving Blitz's continued belief that everything is a put-on by friends and relatives long after this could be remotely possible). Still, the momentum of the opening premise mostly carries the book, and the story has some depth as it explores the contingent nature of human behavior, the butterfly effect, and ultimately the question of free will and human responsibility.