DCS Kat Frank knows all about loss. A widowed single mother, Kat is a cop who trusts her instincts. Picked to lead a pilot programme that has her paired with AIDE (Artificially Intelligent Detective Entity) Lock, Kat’s instincts come up against Lock’s logic. But when the two missing person’s cold cases they are reviewing suddenly become active, Lock is the only one who can help Kat when the case gets personal. 

IN A NUTSHELL
That was a wonderful read. It had edge-of-the-seat moments of tension, a satisfying mystery, well-founded speculations on the use of AI in the near future and a deeply empathetic understanding of grief and loss.

It was a great start to a new series. I can see why this novel won the Theakston Old Peculiar Crime Novel Of The Year 2024 and the CWA New Blood Dagger 2024. I’ve already downloaded ‘Leave No Trace’, the next book in the series.

This was a book that exceeded my expectations and my expectations were already high given the prizes that it had won. This could have been a police-procedural-with-a-twist book, living off the novelty of an AI paired with a human detective and I’d have thought it worth the read. But it was much more than that. This was a book with real people in it, a solid mystery at its heart, and a deep understanding of loss and grief.

It was a tense, clever, page-turner police procedural, even without the AI. I loved that the AI, instead of being an ‘Oooh! SHINY!‘ piece of technology, a sort of digital CSI, became a means of focusing on how we look beyond the statistical probabilities and understand the unique challenges people are facing and the desires, fears, and perceptions that shape their responses.

I found the first few pages, where Kat, the human detective, is challenging the viability of using Lock, the AI on a case that affects real people’s lives a little dry but it didn’t drag. I liked that the AI technology concepts stood up as near-future possibilities.

For me, everything took off after the first interview with the missing person’s mother. The dialogue felt real and was quite affecting. I liked that the case was set in Warwickshire. It gave the story a very normal, down-to-earth, English feel that made the AI wizardry easier to accept. it helped that the AI stayed plausible and mostly irritating (which seemed about right to me) and that Kat was just the right balance of attributes and history to provide the empathy, emotion and social context needed to move the story forward. For once, the lead detective isn’t some bright young thing. She’s been on the force for twenty-five years. She’s a recent widow and a single mother to a traumatised son. She’s not perfect but she is good at what she does. It was easy to be on her side. I became completely immersed in her story,

The mystery at the heart of ‘In The A Blink Of An Eye‘ was solid. It would have made for an engaging police procedural story without the AI content. Adding the AI kept it fresh and gave it an edge.Surpisingly, it also made the investigation feel more human rather than more routine or mechanical. It helped that the story wasn’t mainly about the AI. It was about the people, those who go missing, those they leave behind, those who are trying to find them and the difficult emotions that they experience. It was about how we see each other and how much of what we see isn’t consciously based on data that can be calibrated, quantified, compared, replicated or even tested. It highlighted that the experience of being human is at its most real and its most powerful when can’t be turned into binary code.

This book kept me on edge almost to the last page. It was a very satisfying read. I’m eager to see where the series will go next. I’ve downloaded the second book, ‘Leave No Trace‘ and I’m looking forward to the third book, ‘Human Remains’ being released in April 2025.

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