4 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

Evie has a comfortable life in the luxury penthouse flat that she lives in with her husband, Matthew. She is fortunate to have a garden on the roof too otherwise after it would have come too oppressive. They have a live-in assistant called Daniels who helps in all sorts of ways around the place. They have been married for 40 years now and yet Evie still looks around 21 years old. This is because she is a near-perfect bioengineered human. This android type was declared illegal many years ago and if it was to become known that she still exists, then there are plenty of corporations that would want to use her to learn how she is made.

The world that they live in is very different from our own, it is after climate change has savaged people lives and the post-apocalyptical Britain is much colder after the Gulf Stream stopped, there has been a collapse in the birth rate, the food chain has been decimated the very fabric of the society that we know has been shattered. The police force is there to protect the wealthy from the poor and if you have money, you live in your own bubble away from the misery outside.

Her comfortable world comes to an abrupt end one day, a hova car drops down into her garden with the intention of capturing her and taking her for the reward that is offered. She resists capture, but she knows that she must flee to evade capture. She and Daniels head to Cambridge where there is a cottage that they can stay in while they decide what to do next. It is while in the city that she becomes aware that there is another of her kind around, but he is imprisoned behind glass. The authorities are on their tail though and they have barely been there before it is time to move on and see if they make it to Europe. The race to evade capture is on…

Braddon has written a fast-paced science fiction thriller with a fully believable plot. The main character, Evie feel fully developed, but the others that she interacts with feel a little two dimensional. I really liked the world that he has created in this book, his dystopian future, 100 years on from now, is utterly different to our own and feels both plausible and utterly terrifying at the same time. I thought that there were a couple of inconsistencies in some of the tiny details, but that was not enough to stop me from enjoying this book.

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