In The Blink of an Eye by Jo Callaghan
Published by Simon & Schuster
Publication Date: 19th January 2023
Book Description:
In the UK, someone is reported missing every 90 seconds.
Just gone. Vanished. In the blink of an eye.
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.
AI versus human experience.
Logic versus instinct.
With lives on the line can the pair work together before someone else becomes another statistic?
My Thoughts:
I put off reading this book for so long. Me and "sci-fi" don't go well together, but my interest was piqued because so many of my reader friends were shouting loud about how good this book is. So I decided to borrow it from my local library - I didn't want to invest money in a book that I was fairly sure I wouldn't be a fan of. How wrong could I be? I was absolutely drawn in to the storyline right from the off.
Kat Frank is a recent widow; she's devastated but determined to try to stay positive in order to focus her 18 year old son who has just finished his A levels. She decides it's time to get some semblance of normality back in her life and return to work. However, her boss has decided that the best way to ease her back in to detective work is to put her on a new project looking into cold cases but with the added assistance of new technology: AI. Artificial Intelligence. This is the part that had turned me away from this book for so long, and Kat isn't too thrilled with the idea either. The team of traditional detectives is to join forces and trawl a selection of cold cases and come up with a plan of whether any or all of them have sufficient clues to afford a reopening of the case. The AI detective is known as Locke and, rather than being a dull computer program where you push buttons to get a report, is a holographic data crunching device which unknowingly has a great sense of humour. If you've ever watched Star Trek you will recognise the style from characters such as Spock and Data. After several clashes of "personality" and opinions, Kat and Aide soon begin to find some common ground - Locke's ability to trawl CCTV footage and phone records at superhuman speeds soon have Kat wondering whether it has earned its place on the team already, but all the credit earned is lost in an instant when a huge error of judgment is made due to Locke's lack of understanding of human emotions.
I don't want to give too much of the storyline away but suffice to say things get extremely personal when Kat's son goes missing, and she's asked to step away from the case they are investigating when links are made between him and the previous evidence. Her team are dedicated enough to her to hold her ideas in mind as they continue to investigate, but will it be enough for AI to become a regular part of police work, and Kat's son to be found before the it's too late?
I absolutely love this book, and am looking forward to my turn in the queue at the library for Jo Callaghan's follow up novel Leave No Trace which has also recently been released. If, like me, you're really unsure whether this is the book for you, but you enjoy a good old police procedural novel with a touch of humour thrown in, I'd say give it a try - I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
About the Author:
Jo Callaghan works fulltime as a senior strategist, where she has carried out research into the future impact of AI and genomics on the workforce.
She was a student of the Writers’ Academy Course (Penguin Random House), was long listed for the Myslexia Novel Writing Competition and Bath Novel Competition. After losing her husband to cancer in 2019 when she was just forty-nine, she started writing IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE, her debut crime novel, which explores learning to live with loss and what it means to be human. She lives with her two children in the midlands, where she spends far too much time tweeting as @JoCallaghanKat and has recently released the second novel in the series, Leave No Trace.
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