From the sublime to the mansplaining ridiculous. I don't know what I thought this book was about - AI, maybe, one of my pet subjects - but what I got was a cut and shut of boring tech discourse/ranting about surveillance society and every Hollywood action film ever. I'm not even sure what got all the characters so excited - an 'Internet activist' called Zero sends a drone after the US president and a London newspaper decides to hunt him down. The ranting starts when a lifestyle program called FreeMee is discovered to be involved in a dark 'experiment' to control the data and minds of the general population.

The first half of the plot had some interesting theories about who owns information and public surveillance - love the smart glasses - but got bogged down in technological terms and conspiracies. Teenage characters start spouting unlikely dialogue about apps and data sharing, and the bad guys share entire board meetings about technology. The only relatable character is Cynthia, the clueless Gen X journalist and mother who needs everything explaining to her, on behalf of the reader: 'Cyn looks helplessly at him, urging him to go into more detail.' Please don't!

And then Cynthia travels to Vienna - where the author lives - on the trail of Zero, before being invited to New York as a guest on a chat show, and the book has an entire personality transplant. Easier to read than the technobabble, granted, but my brain was reeling. Wine-drinking tecnophobe Cynthia is suddenly running for her life through sewers like a mutant turtle and frantically uploading videos from teenagers that are 80% guesswork. At one point, she manages to escape both the police and the FBI just by walking away - and jumping down a manhole - while they bicker at each other!

Aside from the bonkers pacing and heavy exposition, the writing is also confusing, jumping between scenes without a break. And there is a list of characters at the back of the book which would have been better placed at the front, because I had no idea who was who or what they were doing, apart from Cynthia - and honestly, cared even less. I'm guessing blokes will love this book, but I prefer character-base fiction and was both bored and confused throughout. ( )

compelling but not as convincing as Blackout. very unsettling in its bleakness ( )

The book seems more hurried and breathless than
his last one and less convincing. It is still an entertainingly fast-paced thriller, but the plot has its holes. Especially the random underground chases in Vienna and New York were too much, and while the concerns it raises about tech and choice are valid, it doesn't always do that in a very subtle way. I am also not overly keen on the ableism and the way neuroatypical people are portrayed here. ( )