This week, I’m in the mood for something exciting so I’ve picked up two near-future thrillers that came out last year. Both are written by women based out of San Francisco. Both are set in a not-too-distant America. One imagines a woman building a relationship with a prototype of a new generation of digital assistants. The other imagines an America that has responded to terrorist attacks by becoming more authoritarian. Both of them promise some edge-of-the-seat moments.

I’m hoping for well-written thrillers set in credible near-futures.

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‘Amen Maxine’ by Faith Gardner (2022)

I’m one of those paranoid types that disables Siri and Alexa and never uses voice commands for digital devices because I hate the idea that the machine is always listening and I don’t trust it not to transmit what it hears, so the idea of a subversive, manipulative digital assistant undermining the confidence of a vulnerable, depressed woman seems very plausible to me.

I’m hoping this one will be a page-turner

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’48 States’ by Evette Davis (2022)

There was a time when dystopian visions of America’s future felt like science fiction thought experiments. Now, they feel like something that might be only one bad election result or one major disaster away from reality.

I’m hoping that this dystopia is well thought through and that the focus is less on the world-building and more on the struggles of the two main characters caught up in events that they can’t escape and can’t control – which I suspect will become the new normal for many of us.

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