‘Memory Zero’ – Keri Arthur (Piatkus)

The plan was to have read Matthew Sturges’ ‘Midwinter’ for a review today but that didn’t happen. I’ll talk about it more in the review but suffice it to say that ‘Midwinter’ isn’t a book that I wanted to rush through in an evening, I want to take my time over this one...
This left me with a gap though and I wanted to keep the momentum up (I don’t feel like I’ve reviewed enough books just recently...) I was looking for something relatively short to read and came across ‘Memory Zero’ on the reading pile. I’ve never read anything by Keri Arthur and haven’t reviewed anything from Piatkus... until now that is, time to kill two birds with one stone! :o)

Samantha Ryan is a police woman (in a near future Melbourne) with no memory of her past, just a crayon drawing with the word ‘Mummy’ written underneath. It seems others know more than she does however, including her partner who is more than he appears and will quite happily kill her to avoid her uncovered powers falling into the wrong hands. Sam is well aware of the vampires and shape shifters that inhabit our world, she didn’t think she would end up working with a shape shifter not only to clear her name but also as part of something far bigger than she had imagined...

At first glance, ‘Memory Zero’ comes across like most other urban fantasies on the shelves and goes on to confirm this in spades. To be fair, the near future setting was a decent enough spin and I’ve never read an urban fantasy set in Australia so that was quite a refreshing approach to take as well. When you get to the bottom of it though you’ve still got the ‘woman with a mysterious past and powers she doesn’t understand’ as well as ‘the male lead who could grow to like her and she doesn’t mind him either but they’re not getting on right now’ and the ‘evil cartoon villain who is all to willing to share his entire plan with Sam just before she escapes...’ If you feel like you’ve read this book before, it’s because you probably have (just with different names).

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing though if you’ve got a plot that picks things up and hurtles along, throwing up a few twists and turns along the way. ‘Memory Zero’ certainly does the former, there’s plenty going on and it’s all punctuated by gunfights and lots of explosions which is just my kind of thing.
It tries to do the latter as well and this is where things fall down slightly... Sam Ryan has certain powers but she doesn’t know what they are or how to work them. One of the results of this is that she can sense danger but she doesn’t know why; this seems to constantly result in her spying out bad guys and traitors which makes any tension just disappear. Things are a lot better, in this regard, when the action switches to shape shifter Gabriel who cannot see the danger coming...

‘Memory Zero’ isn’t a bad story as such, it’s just a story that (for me) seems to borrow a little too heavily from its genre rather than standing out as a tale in it’s own right. Maybe I’ve just read far too much urban fantasy, maybe I haven’t read enough in order to be able to properly get all the little differences. I don’t know...
What I would say though is that ‘Memory Zero’ is one for hard core urban fantasy fans only...

Six and Three Quarters out of Ten