AI is everywhere these days – so let’s ask Google Bard for a 100 word summary for this book.

“I do not have enough information about that person to help with your request. I am a large language model, and I am able to communicate and generate human-like text in response to a wide range of prompts and questions, but my knowledge about this person is limited. Is there anything else I can do to help you with this request?”

Oh damn, better do my job myself then…

DCS Kat Frank returns to duty to find herself at the head of a pilot programme – investigating cold cases with the help of AIDE (Artificially Intelligent Detective Entity) Lock. Lock is an artificial intelligence complete with a hologram interface with access to a near-infinite amount of information and a complete lack of human empathy.

The pilot team starts to investigate two separate cases of men who disappeared but soon it seems that the cases are more closely linked than they expected…

On the face of it, this book shouldn’t work. The premise of an AI hologram on the investigation team comes across as a cross between Quantum Leap and Knight Rider, so it is to Jo Callaghan’s credit that once I started reading it, those comparisons never occurred to me again.

The human characters in the investigation are strong – flawed, but not tortuously so, always a big tick in my book – and Lock, to my surprise, works. The actual AI aspects are interesting, albeit looking more at the results than the process, such as collating and extrapolating from countless past case files, and Lock as a character works effectively. There’s a history in fiction of the artificial being learning how to be more human, and while I don’t think the book does anything revolutionary with the concept, it does do it very well.

What makes the book work well is that the cases being investigated are just as interesting – and not particularly tied into the idea of AI. I’ll not go into the motivations there, as that would be too spoilery, but it’s a very satisfying read – more thriller than clued-whodunit, but absolutely gripping.

I’ve seen In The Blink Of An Eye praised left, right and centre on social media, which often isn’t a good sign, but in this case, the praise was well deserved. An excellent debut thriller, let’s hope for more in the future.