This week's Be More Bookish assignment was all about appeal factors.

Project Cain and Cain's Blood by Geoffrey Girard
These paired novels tell the same story - about a government-sponsored project in which serial killer DNA is used to create clones, which you know can't end well - from the point of view of two different characters.
Ostensibly written for two different audiences - the protagonist of Project Cain is a 15-year-old clone of Jeffrey Dahmer, and therefore that book will be marketed as YA, while Cain's Blood follows a former Army Ranger dispatched to kill or capture Jeff and the other clones after they escape from their top-secret school - both books are similarly grim in tone and feature graphic violence and images of psychological and physical torture of children. Teens who can handle Stephen King, Dean Koontz, John Connolly and the like will be able to stomach Project Cain, but tread carefully.
The pace is mainly fairly speedy, but slows in spots when the other book's main character is the focus of the action.
Readers who enjoy semi-sciencey horror like Robin Cook, Lincoln Child, and Michael Crichton might enjoy the Cain novels - but the science doesn't hold up to any kind of scrutiny, so readers who lose patience with speculative fiction that plays it fast and loose will roll their eyes.

When We Wake by Karen Healey
More squirrely science can be found in Karen Healey's new teen thriller. Future tech and social intrigue mystify teenage Tegan when she wakes up in a hospital a hundred years after attending a political rally. She doesn't remember having been shot, and she certainly doesn't remember having been cryogenically frozen in an experimental procedure.
Tegan's naturally optimistic nature and flippant tone keep this book rather lighter than other future medical ethics stories - I am looking at you, The Adoration of Jenna Fox et sequelae. In fact, the inclusion of decent action - not to mention a media-savvy makeover - recalls The Hunger Games more than anything.
Karen Healey's two previous books, Guardian of the Dead and The Shattering, are better-crafted, more mysterious, and more thought-provoking. When We Wake, however, mixes romance, action, and light sci-fi in a combination that is very popular right now.
And based on appeal factors expressed in some of Zeke's reviews, I suggested a couple of books for him.