4 out of 5 stars
A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.
It has reached the point in the UK where the state is the all-seeing and all-knowing entity that watches all its citizens. Every single thing you say or do or post is recorded and the state has unlimited access to your innermost thoughts. Almost all the population has accepted this, partly as society is the safest it could be in history.
The state wants to respond to any potential threat to the security of itself and the population, and whilst interrogating a dissident, Diana Hunter, she dies in custody. This is the first time that this has happened and they need a top investigator to find out what exactly happened; the trusted state inspector Mielikki Neith is assigned to the investigation.
Immersing herself in the neural recording of the investigation, she slowly starts to realise that things are not as they seem. Rather than just finding the lady who passed away, she finds a number of different characters from an alchemist to an artist. Circling below these characters is an entity that calls itself Gnomon; Neith doesn’t know what it is but it is very much not of this time.
Nothing is as it seems and as she tries to untangle the complex web inside the neural recordings, she at last gets a glimpse of the real Diana Hunter. It comes to her that they hold snippets of the answer that she must decode. But doing that will reveal to her the perilous state that the System is in and if she can do anything about it.
I liked a lot of things about this book. I liked the way that society has been constructed and the all-seeing ‘System’ guides steers and watches, always watches the populace of the UK. I thought that the technologies enabling Neith to see inside Hunter’s mind were as fascinating as they were terrifying. The pervasive state is a disturbing mixed bag of a utopian/dystopian future, there is still those who wish to circumvent it.
I did think that it had a few flaws though. It is mind-bendingly complex and deeply layered and it took me a while to work out who was who. It did feel a bit overwritten too and could have been shorter in my opinion with a much tighter plot. I won’t expand on the plot too much as that would spoil it for anyone else wanting to venture into this weird world, but I did like it, once I had formed my mind around the convolutions. It might be a bit overwhelming for some people, but be patient with it and it will reward you as a reader.
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