Published By: Harvill
Pages: 448
Released On: 23/07/2026
After the murder of his best friend, newlyweds Adam and Aisha cut their honeymoon short. But just as they are about to board a flight home from Delhi, Adam disappears at the airport – seemingly kidnapped – leaving Aisha stranded without her passport, her phone, or answers.
When the FBI and India’s intelligence agency begin interrogating her, it becomes chillingly clear they know far more about Adam than she ever did. Her only clue is his final, haunting message: I’m sorry.
Thousands of miles away, Sara Wolf, a scientist stuck on a dead-end project at Princeton, receives a message she never expected from her former lover. It contains two words: Help her.
Bound together by suspicion, rivalry, and a man they both love, Aisha and Sara are forced into an uneasy alliance. Decoding Adam’s clues, they follow a trail that leads them across the United States – into a shadow world of weaponised AI, tech billionaires, and a secret no one is meant to find.
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and Harvill for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
I own one or two of Ajay’s books but this is the first one I’m reading.
It wasn’t what I expected at all.
I was expecting a traditional thriller, which it did give me, but it’s also very sci-fi. I don’t read much sci-fi, and I wasn’t expecting it at all. Because whilst the synopsis does mention AI, it’s a tiny hint and there’s no suggestion that it’s more than that. I did like it, but I didn’t love it. The thrillery aspects were good, and the sci-fi bits were okay, but they felt at odds with each other. It suffers a bit from not really knowing what it was and I’d have preferred if it was just a straight thriller.
It’s a good 100 pages longer than I prefer. Overall I felt the pacing was right and didn’t drag. Although some bits were a bit slower than others but that’s to be expected in a story that covers 450 pages.
It’s a timely book, full of AI and implants and tech controlling everyone etc. and so it was quite close to home. I am of an age where I can say I am older than the internet (or what we know as the internet today), and went through school with hardly any computer use, and so the technical aspects did go over my head. I think it would be better for a younger reader who has grown up with these technological developments. And I really am not a fan of AI so it was hard to find a positive spin on that.
It is quite complicated, lots of subplots weaving together and whilst they are interesting in their own ways, I wondered if there were perhaps too many. I was confused by a lot of them, but that might be because of my inability to remember names.
I can’t say the characters are particularly likeable, but nor are they overly unlikeable. Some have bigger roles than others, and some felt very caricature, like the pantomime villain for example. But the rest were just a bit…flat. They didn’t give me much to grab hold of which meant I didn’t really care what happened to them.
It wasn’t a bad book and I enjoyed elements of it and look forward to reading his other books, but it didn’t quite nail what I was expecting. I think it needed to focus on the thriller side OR the sci-fi side to make it stronger, and it needed characters to care about. But it is fast paced and quick to read and it gets you thinking, which I think is often a good thing in a book.
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