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** spoiler alert ** Immensely clever plotting - almost a bit too clever, as if the twists and turns and genuine originality risk taking on more significance than the characters - but they don't, the two main characters definitely hold their own. The others do become less vivid, maybe because there are simply so many of them, and the various complex family mysteries in triplicate with their bizarro parallels each have so many operatives.
The original Johnny Hawke sidekick/new partner is a smart, interesting secondary character but of course he dies - and then the 'I'm here to serve' line got used and re-used...
Plus the odd memory lapses and unexplained flashbacks, even on Johnny's part and he was curiously not of an age to be succumbing to Alzheimer's.
After the third complex high-powered family takeover, with its fiancees, suicides and Me-Too patriarchal figures, I said to my partner: I can't see how Brookmyre is going to explain all this in any halfway rational manner. He's dug himself into a hole...
And that was when I twigged the outcome, which also explained the odd memory lapses, repetitions etc. I have to say it would not be my preferred outcome; the story read better and far more edge-of-seat for me when it was all in the world of the real.
But you have to admire the sheer brilliance of it all.
Further slightly critical thoughts: Johnny's voice is less well-realised than Penny's: posh Brit comes easier to Chris than hard-boiled American, whose ain'ts and holly-gollys can be jarring even though you sort of get past them.
The final final twist, when Penny realises almost with her last breath who the real perps are in not one but two cases, is a twist too far and too last-gasp tacked-on to offer genuine closure. Shoulda stuck with the one before.
PS don't know what was the significance of the final epiphany - blood in the locket!! Yes, DNA - but what, why?