The brand-new thriller featuring DCS Kat Frank and AIDE Lock from the award-winning and Sunday Times bestselling author of In the Blink of an Eye. With thanks to Jo for the below review!

Warning – this is the latest book in a long series and there are spoilers about previous books, within this one. If you’re planning to read the whole series don’t start with this! Having said that, this is the first book that I read in the series – and it has made me want to read the rest.

The books starts as a well written police procedural, but with a difference. There is an AI Detective ont he team – AIDE Lock. He is incredibly useful for gathering and sifting through data from all source sand summarising the key points and coming to the logical conclusions without bias. But does he have the human creativity needed?

A murder of a local MP, who is very much anti-AI, needs investigating, and the future policing team including AIDE Lock is sent to do the job. The investigation struggles along with various factors impacting it and then the book begins to ramp up into a very tense thriller. It is excellent. The whole question of AI, especially in policing (but also in other areas), is tackled in an interesting way and I was left with many questions about if this is a way forward or whether we need to understand more and put in more restraints around its use…

An excellent book that had me hooked, got me asking lots of questions about AI and its use. I may even need to go back and read the earlier books too… five stars from me.

About the Book

Human suspicion. AI manipulation.
Who can you trust when truth has no meaning? 

DCS Kat Frank returns to work at the Future Policing Unit after a tragic loss, only to find herself thrust into a new high-profile case. On the night of Halloween a local MP is found murdered, with a taunting message written in binary code that seems to target Kat specifically: Catch me if you can.

The victim’s anti-AI sentiments suggest a political motive, and as Kat investigates with her partner AIDE Lock – the world’s first AI detective – she finds herself once again battling her own prejudices about the technological future he represents. But when a cyberattack takes out the National Grid, Kat and Lock have to race against the clock to track down the hacker before thousands die.

Tangled in a web of suspicion and deception, Kat must choose who and what to believe when the truth seems to defy both instinct and logic.

Can she set aside her old doubts and put her faith in her AI partner one last time?
Or will this case send Lock down a path she just can’t follow – a path that will leave humanity behind for good?

About The Author

Jo Callaghan works full time as a senior strategist, carrying out research into the future impact of AI and genomics on the workforce. She was a student of the Writers’ Academy Course (Penguin Random House) and was longlisted for the Mslexia Novel Writing Competition and Bath Novel Competition. After losing her husband to cancer in 2019 when she was just forty-nine, she started writing In the Blink of an Eye, her debut crime novel, which explores learning to live with loss and what it means to be human. She lives with her two children in the Midlands.

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