A Mind-Bending, Emotion-Stirring, Series-Launching Medical Thriller

“This is definitely one for the weird books.”

So said the partner of the book’s protagonist, Detective Delta Devlin, after they had solved the case. And I’d have to agree. From full-body transplants, to hunting trips for celebrities’ excrement, to “oil changes” for the wealthy—I’ll let you read the book, if you don’t follow those references—The Dreaming Tree is a wild ride between recent advances and imminent breakthroughs in medical science with a bit a pure fiction thrown into the mix. And author Matthew Mather makes it really tough to know just which of those you are reading at any given point in the story.

Of course, in dealing at the bleeding edge of medical science, societal and ethical questions appear at every turn in the plot, not as academic questions, but as part of a baffling, sometimes surreal mystery. When is someone dead? If we can grow parts, why not an entire body? And similarly, your emotions will sustain some collateral damage from treading this ground. References to body-part harvesting among the helpless and the brutally poor are particularly gut wrenching.

Within this backdrop of science vs. fiction, ethics, and emotion, Mather inserts at least two, rather dramatic twists into his storyline. They are revelations that, while not new to frequent readers of mystery and thrillers, will cause you to reframe all that you thought you knew about the head with a new body. Mather’s use of this technique, however, leads me to a minor quibble. The last twist comes so late that despite the author speeding through the threads of the tale, the reader doesn’t have time for the new mindset to gel. Basically, the end feels a bit rushed and some of the threads feel like they are still dangling.

No review of The Dreaming Tree would be complete without mention of Mather’s new, series protagonist, Delta Devlin. Besides having a melodic, alliterating name that describes her roots—Delta for her mother from the South, Devlin for her Irish father—she’s a tetrachromat. She has four color receptors in her eyes, rather than the three that most of us have. That visual capability lets her spot subtle changes in a person’s coloration, say, when he/she is lying. Maybe this is a bit of a stretch of what a tetrachromat can do, or maybe not, but it adds a dimension to an already likeable character. I’ll be watching for book 2 in the series. ( )

On the outside, this book seems exciting. After being decapitated in a car accident, Roy is now one of the world’s first full body transplant patients. This means that his head has literally been grafted onto someone else’s body. His life is now wave after wave of phantom pain, and is filled with someone else’s body odour. Well that and walking blackouts.

Check out my full review here!

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