Constance Books in Order

The Constance books are near-future thrillers built around one big change to the world: human cloning works, and the wealthy can use regular consciousness backups to step past death. Matthew Fitzsimmons treats that idea less like distant space opera and more like a pressure point in ordinary life. The result is a series that feels close to home, even when the science gets strange.

The first book, Constance, follows Con D'Arcy in the Washington, D.C., area. Con has been given her own clone by her late aunt, a pioneer in the field, but that strange insurance policy stays mostly in the background until everything goes wrong. After a routine upload, she wakes in a clinic to learn that eighteen months have passed, her original self is dead, and the memories that could explain it are gone. To find out who killed her, and why someone wants her dead again, she has to retrace a life she no longer fully remembers.

Coming back to life is the easy part.

What makes this series work is the way the speculative idea feeds a real thriller engine. These books ask what identity means when a body can be replaced, but they never drift too far from the chase. There are detectives, corporate interests, anti-cloning militants, hidden motives, and a constant sense that money buys second chances for some people and disaster for everyone around them. Washington matters here, too. Power, policy, and wealth are not background decoration, they shape every risk Con faces.

The second book, Chance, widens the lens instead of simply repeating the first story. Set in Los Angeles two years later, it follows Chance Harker, a clone who was revived after he and his brother were murdered in a botched kidnapping. Chance has turned his strange survival into a public spectacle, using death-defying stunts to feed fame and attention, until a fresh reboot leaves him accused of killing a man he has never met. Now he has to outrun the police, old kidnappers, and a furious public while digging into the crime and his family's past. It is the same world, but seen from a sharper celebrity and class angle.

The bodies can be replaced. The damage cannot.

Across both books, Fitzsimmons keeps the tone tense, smart, and a little noir. The science is interesting, but the real draw is the human mess around it: grief that does not disappear, families that fracture under pressure, and people trying to decide whether survival is the same thing as getting a life back. You can read each novel for its mystery, but together they make a fuller picture of a society where technology has outrun ethics. If you like your thrillers fast-moving but still interested in ideas, this series has a lot to work with.