False Hearts Is a Near-Future Thriller About a Unique Sisterly Bond
Laura Lam’s swift, intense False Hearts is a hard beast to characterize. Its unusual sister protagonists and speculative science elements seem ripped from the best episode of Orphan Black you’ve never seen. The overall mood, meanwhile, and the plot, about gruesome crimes sweeping the streets of a near-future San Francisco, lend themselves to throwback pulp territory. A mysterious cult holed up in the Muir Woods also factors heavily in the action, further preventing easy categorization.
False Hearts: A Novel
Hardcover $24.99
False Hearts: A Novel
By Laura Lam
Hardcover $24.99
Whatever you want to call it, Lam’s adult debut (she’s previously published a YA fantasy series) is a thriller, fast-paced and full of intrigue from start to finish. That action—secretive cult, powerful drugs, high-profile murder, seedy sex—rests on the able shoulders of Tila and Taema, the formerly conjoined twins at the heart of the story. Through their alternating POV chapters, we explore a nearly crime-free* post-war San Francisco. Their unique relationship, with each other and the world around them, provides a fish-out-of-water perspective that roots us in unfamiliar environs.
*minus the organized kind
Conjoined for the first 16 years of their lives, Tila and Taema were reared in the cloistered confines of Mana’s Hearth, a cult that eschews “modern” (post-1969) technology and scorns the “impure” world that surrounds its wooded borders. When their shared heart began to fail, they fled to San Francisco, where they were not only saved, but separated.
A decade later, their surgical division has splintered them in more ways than one. Living apart, Tila and Taema’s lives take diverging paths. Taema is staid and steady, while Tila embraces the role of the free spirit. The balance is preserved until suddenly it isn’t—one night, Tila shows up on her sister’s doorstep soaked in someone else’s blood.
With her sister accused of murdering an agent of massive underground crime syndicate the Ratel, Taema is thrust into a world she can barely comprehend. The only way to prove her sister is innocent is to go undercover in the Ratel itself to root out the truth. Her mission is hazy to begin with, blurred at its edges by Tila’s secrets and the trafficking of Verve, dangerous new drug that allows violent desires to play out in a frightening dreamscape. One thing is clear: in some way, the twins’ past at Mana’s Hearth is directly linked to their present dilemma. The how is uncertain, but the lessons the twins learned in those woods have uniquely positioned them to find the answers they seek. As Taema digs deeper into the current mystery, Tila unpacks the enigma of their past, scrawling missives from her jail cell about their childhood, their arrival in the city, and the deep wounds they both carry.
Psychology and mirrored reality play a large part, both in the plot and with the dueling drugs that drive it: while criminals flood the streets with Verse, the government pushes a sister pharmaceutical, Zeal. Legal and abundant, Zeal allows people to experience their deepest desires, if only in their minds. The government credits the low crime rate to this safe, private pressure release, but Verve is a different beast—unleashing its users’ most violent yens and giving them dangerous, unpredictable life. As she races to save her sister, Taema struggles to get ahead of the Verve trade before it perverts the equanimity she values in the world around her. It’s a high-wire act, and Lam pulls it off brilliantly, playing each sister at her own game and doling out backstory with masterful timing. Like Taema, you’ll hardly have a chance to catch your breath.
False Hearts is available now.
Whatever you want to call it, Lam’s adult debut (she’s previously published a YA fantasy series) is a thriller, fast-paced and full of intrigue from start to finish. That action—secretive cult, powerful drugs, high-profile murder, seedy sex—rests on the able shoulders of Tila and Taema, the formerly conjoined twins at the heart of the story. Through their alternating POV chapters, we explore a nearly crime-free* post-war San Francisco. Their unique relationship, with each other and the world around them, provides a fish-out-of-water perspective that roots us in unfamiliar environs.
*minus the organized kind
Conjoined for the first 16 years of their lives, Tila and Taema were reared in the cloistered confines of Mana’s Hearth, a cult that eschews “modern” (post-1969) technology and scorns the “impure” world that surrounds its wooded borders. When their shared heart began to fail, they fled to San Francisco, where they were not only saved, but separated.
A decade later, their surgical division has splintered them in more ways than one. Living apart, Tila and Taema’s lives take diverging paths. Taema is staid and steady, while Tila embraces the role of the free spirit. The balance is preserved until suddenly it isn’t—one night, Tila shows up on her sister’s doorstep soaked in someone else’s blood.
With her sister accused of murdering an agent of massive underground crime syndicate the Ratel, Taema is thrust into a world she can barely comprehend. The only way to prove her sister is innocent is to go undercover in the Ratel itself to root out the truth. Her mission is hazy to begin with, blurred at its edges by Tila’s secrets and the trafficking of Verve, dangerous new drug that allows violent desires to play out in a frightening dreamscape. One thing is clear: in some way, the twins’ past at Mana’s Hearth is directly linked to their present dilemma. The how is uncertain, but the lessons the twins learned in those woods have uniquely positioned them to find the answers they seek. As Taema digs deeper into the current mystery, Tila unpacks the enigma of their past, scrawling missives from her jail cell about their childhood, their arrival in the city, and the deep wounds they both carry.
Psychology and mirrored reality play a large part, both in the plot and with the dueling drugs that drive it: while criminals flood the streets with Verse, the government pushes a sister pharmaceutical, Zeal. Legal and abundant, Zeal allows people to experience their deepest desires, if only in their minds. The government credits the low crime rate to this safe, private pressure release, but Verve is a different beast—unleashing its users’ most violent yens and giving them dangerous, unpredictable life. As she races to save her sister, Taema struggles to get ahead of the Verve trade before it perverts the equanimity she values in the world around her. It’s a high-wire act, and Lam pulls it off brilliantly, playing each sister at her own game and doling out backstory with masterful timing. Like Taema, you’ll hardly have a chance to catch your breath.
False Hearts is available now.