Adam Colclough lives and works in the West Midlands, he writes regularly for a number of websites, one day he will get round to writing a book for someone else to review.
In the near future the government makes self-driving cars compulsory, claiming it is acting in the band of public safety.
Eight of these driver-less vehicles are hijacked seemingly at random, each one containing a single occupant. At the same time a 'jury' set up to decide where blame lies in cases of death on the roads involving self-driving cars is meeting in London.
The Hacker, a seemingly omnipotent figure behind the hijackings announces that the cars will collide killing their passengers in two hours. It is up to the jury along with a watching public voting on social media to choose just one person to save.
This is a timely and often disturbing book, like any good writer of dystopian fiction Marrs has his finger firmly on the pulse of our nervous times. All the things that keep us from sleep are here, from the creeping advance of AI to government and big business mining our private data.
He wraps this up in a plot that is genuinely thrilling and pulls the rug from under his readers, as each of the hostages turns out to have a back story that is less clear-cut than it might appear. At important points we (like the unseen public voting on social media for which passenger should be allowed to live), are wrong-footed by our own preconceptions; not a comfortable position to be in.
This is an important book that tackles big issues. If the future we are rushing towards is an uncanny valley, anything like the one described here, then we better hope it welcomes careful drivers.
