Doubleday
Published July 15, 2025
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
In an office near Washington D.C., a computer scientist leading a select team of coders of color and high talent works frantically to find out what is throwing strange errors in a system that needs to work flawlessly as the company prepares to goes public. But just as he uncovers malicious lines of code, something in the air scrambles his thoughts, and soon all three of them are lying unconscious on the floor. One of them never wakes up.
Lawyer Avery Keene, formerly a Supreme Court clerk (While Justice Sleeps, Rogue Justice), now works for a white-shoe K Street firm that specializes in discreet internal investigations for corporations. She’s brought in as a consultant by the head of Camasca, a biomedical technology company that has developed a highly sophisticated system of AI-enhanced healthcare that is attempting to deliver data-driven care free of historical systemic bias. Camasca currently has contracts from the federal government to trial their system with veterans, many of whom suffer from complex conditions, and they plan to go public within weeks. But the public launch could falter if word got out that one of its employees died under circumstances that are not entirely clear. The company’s head isn’t convinced by the hasty police investigation that attributed the death to an accidental mechanical fault. He wants to know what really happened, even at the risk of scuttling a highly-anticipated and potentially lucrative public offering.
He’s talking to the right woman. Avery relishes the security of her new job, and the higher salary that has made her life much more comfortable, but the work has been dull. This opportunity will give her a chance to draw together good friends whose specialties in medicine, law, and technology will complement her investigation. And it’s hard for her to resist looking into a mystery that might involve an unsolved murder.
As they begin to dig into the company, they are dazzled by its technological wizardry, driven by a neural network that draws on a deep database of medical knowledge and reams of personal data to create novel, highly personalized treatments. Aided by intelligent robots, it’s able to communicate with doctors, create new pharmaceuticals, diagnose patients, and develop care plans. It will revolutionize medicine — or may supplant human decisions. Avery’s job is to find out if something in the system or someone who is sabotaging it caused an employee to die. The work becomes more desperate when patients begin to present with unusual and deadly complications.
This novel is as much science fiction as a mystery, using the murder to delve into debates around artificial intelligence: will it enhance our lives immeasurably, or could it grow powerful and destructive? (A third possibility, that it’s an overhyped and faulty technology that promises more than it can deliver, isn’t entertained here.) Abrams has invented a frighteningly intelligent AI that can control hospital environments, debate diagnoses with doctors and even play a philosophical chess game with Avery as she challenges its power.
Some readers may find the amount of technical detail a bit wonky, overshadowing character development. Avery herself is something of a superwoman, not only highly intelligent but tall and beautiful to boot, and her troubled relationship with an equally perfect boyfriend seems like an underdeveloped attempt to add emotional depth to the story. That said, it’s an impressively inventive and suspenseful novel that is teeming with thought-provoking ideas.