I’d like to thank Netgalley UK, Simon & Schuster UK, and Jo Callaghan for such a thought-provoking e-ARC. It's so much more than a dystopian police procedural and asks questions about who we are and what it means to be human. Brilliant' Nikki Smith

Some might argue that AI provides the valuable service of customising fiction to each reader’s tastes and specifications. For example, you could tell AI to “serve” you fiction about an enemies-to-lovers arc that takes place in space. But how will you ever find something else to like if you stay entrenched within the loops fed to you by algorithms? And the oddly specific reading preferences – did algorithms have a hand in shaping those tastes in the first place? Crime fiction is full of detectives who have been paired up with someone they don’t like. Few have to get used to a bossy hologram, which is what happens in Jo Callaghan’s entertaining and thought-provoking novel . . . Callaghan grounds her novel in real life, challenging her unusual team to investigate the unsolved disappearances of two students. The moral dilemmas created by artificial intelligence are brilliantly explored in this altogether very human novel’ Sunday Times Policing requires hundreds of judgments to be made each day, often under conditions of extreme pressure and uncertainty: who and where to police, which cases and victims to prioritise, who to believe and which lines of inquiry to follow. As Malcolm Gladwell explains in Blink , these rapid decisions – often described as “hunches” – are informed by our individual social and emotional experiences, but also the prejudices we have all internalised from wider society, such as racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia. Walter Scott, that master of the 19th-century historical novel, wrote and revised and produced all his life, working industriously at novel after novel. Then towards the end of his life he had a series of debilitating strokes: he could, at the last, barely speak, and was almost unrecognisable as the man he had once been. And yet he kept writing. The very last few Waverley novels are fascinating: not “good” by conventional metrics, but recognisably Scott in a free-associative sort of way, and extraordinary works: as if Scott was a writing machine that just continued churning out stories even after his conscious mind had been disengaged. Reading has always been a bridge, a way of knowing that in the vast expanse of human existence, our joys and sorrows, fears and hopes are shared. But how does one reconcile this when the bridge is built by algorithms and code? While literature’s most extraordinary gift may be its ability to awaken empathy, it’s a curious endeavour to try to connect, to really feel, for something fundamentally unfeeling.

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In The Blink of An Eye turns the standard police procedural on its head, and then some. As we all can imagine, the huge wealth of data that exists now in the world must make detectives' jobs increasingly difficult, with millions of resource hours needed to sift through and analyse for clues.

DSC Kat Frank, newly returned from bereavement leave, is unhappy when her boss directs her to lead a pilot program to test the suitability of using an AIDE (Artificially Intelligent Detective Entity) in a police investigation. Professor Okonedo, determined to better the operation of the force, asserts that the AIDE is not only capable of collating and analysing vast amounts of data in a fraction of the time required by a human, but has been programmed to filter out the bias and prejudice that can taint investigations. Kat doesn’t believe algorithms can truly account for the vagaries of humankind, or replace the experience and instincts she, like most good police officers, often rely on. What we have today isn’t AI. That’s marketing, like describing processed soya as bacon. We’re not getting proper AI, in the sense of an artificial person that thinks and feels, because no one wants to spend billions of dollars creating an entity they would immediately have to emancipate, and because it turns out to be very, very hard. Jo Callaghan makes her entry into the crowded police procedural genre with a fresh take on the buddy-buddy cop trope. In the Blink of an Eye predicts the near future when police officers and their AI counterparts will work hand-in-holographic-hand. The human-AI interactions between the lead protagonists as they pursue their quarry are illuminating and, at times, hilarious. Provocative and compelling. A TV series seems a certainty’ VASEEM KHANJo Callaghan makes her entry into the crowded police procedural genre with a fresh take on the buddy-buddy cop trope . . . Provocative and compelling' Vaseem Khan Clever and compelling, it offers a new take on the police procedural while also examining what it means to be human and the personal cost of loss’ Brian McGilloway She hasn’t but I loved that Callaghan gives us a senior, experienced and confident protagonist and one who’s a significant way through her career and life. Kat’s likeable but has baggage. She’s talented but also fallible.