Body of Lies - Jo Callaghan *****
By Brian Clegg
I recently reviewed a Lovejoy omnibus, bemoaning the fact that in a world of boilerplate crime novels we rarely get books like those that are genuinely different. Thanks to the AI detective Lock in this series, Jo Callaghan is a shining example of thinking differently – (not ‘different’, Apple) and it works brilliantly.
In the fourth and last of the series, Detective Superintendent Kat Frank and Lock take on what initially seems to be the political murder of an MP, but turns out to be a far bigger threat to the whole country. With neatly managed jeopardy it also puts a regular character’s child at risk.
The book feels different to the first three, because of this large scale expansion of the case to take in the likes of the Home Secretary, Prime Minister and head of the Met. As such, the police procedural aspect of the storyline is a lot less to the fore as the plot develops. Instead we become engaged in a debate on how and when to use AI, what we can trust and what we can’t, and the implications of adding robotic bodies to AIs. What’s clever is that Callaghan manages to do this without ever losing her grip on the story or descending into tedious polemic.
As has always been the case there are some technical impossibilities here – in my review of the first book in the series, In the Blink of an Eye, which I classified as science fiction, I majored on these, particularly the problems of projecting a 3D hologram onto empty space. But taking more of a crime viewpoint, the issues are less significant, though I raised an eyebrow at Lock offering to power someone TV by remotely projecting electricity from the bracelet that projects his image to it (magic projection aside, if we had batteries that fit in a bracelet that could power a TV for hours, electric cars would benefit). But it’s a minor quibble.
This is a worthy finale to the series, and I hope to see something new and equally different from Callaghan next.
You can buy Body of Lies from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com or Bookshop.org
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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.
Source: http://brianclegg.blogspot.com/2026/06/body-of-lies-jo-callaghan.html
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