TO A DEBUT AUTHOR comparison with one of the titans of popular fiction can seem like a gift from the gods. More often it turns out to be a Trojan Horse. If I had tuppence for every thriller writer touted on the backpage blurb as the “new le Carré”, I’d be as rich as le Carré and certainly have more fun reviewing.

Sometimes — rarely — it does work out. Kathy Reichs did turn out to be the new Patricia Cornwell. But then as a forensic pathologist-turned- crime writer — a career path which, along with Amanda Burton, has sent thousands of misguided young women into the mortuaries — she had pretty much been a clone all along.

Which brings me to the debut novel by the American author Kevin Guilfoile. Have no fear, it’s not another corpse cutter-turned-sleuth, but it is about cloning, a medical technique that some think can bring the dead back to life.

Unfortunately the blurb on the back makes one of those comparisons that is not just wrong but sets your imagination off in the wrong direction, by hailing Wicker as “the most exhilarating thriller debut since The Andromeda Strain”.

Actually it’s nothing like Michael Crichton’s precocious first novel. That was very much a product of the doom-mongering Cold War Sixties and owed more in style and atmosphere to Failsafe and other apocalyptic “the end is nigh” epics.

While similarly playing on our modern fears and the latest technology, Wicker embodies more of the elements of the crime story and psychological murder mystery. That said, Michael Crichton today would have little grounds to complain of the comparison.

Our hero — of sorts — Davis Moore, is a cloning expert whose daughter Anna Kat, a sparky teenager just discovering a risqué appetite for rough sex, is found strangled in a suburban clothes shop. There are no clues to the identity of her killer.

Driven to distraction, Moore finds himself breaking all his ethical rules in an attempt to find her murderer by surreptitiously giving a childless couple a clone child from the semen found in his daughter’s body. The idea — which he later admits to be crazy — is that the face of the child will lead him to the killer. Needless to say, it all goes horribly wrong.

Purists might justifiably suggest this is a science-fiction novel. In so far as much of the technology and legal framework involved does not yet exist, it is, but it is not handled as such.

Guilfoile gets away with making this seem like a contemporary yarn because none of the technology is even remotely unimaginable: from the already feasible cloning process to facial development software that can predict an adult’s looks from a baby photo.

The legal and social arguments, far from being swept aside, are a mainstay of the plot: the fundamentalist Christian psychopaths who blow up cloning clinics little more than a natural evolution of today’s American wars over abortion.

The other futuristic technological device that Guilfoile relies on is a computer game called Shadow World in which reality, including street locations and people (whether computer-generated or online “avatars” of players), is almost perfectly mirrored. Again that will sound hopelessly far-fetched only to those who have never flirted with Sims 2 or Second Life.

Guilfoile has created a taut, fast-moving cautionary tale for the 21st century set in a world of which we are now, if you’ll pardon the expression, already in the embryonic stages.

Penguin/Michael Joseph £12.95; 336pp
£11.69 (free p&p)
0870 1608080
www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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