I would love to work with AI on a piece of fiction. We could share the royalties, and the AI money could fund more women to get involved in AI research and application. The real problem is not that AI is writing, or will write, or can write. The problem is who is writing the AI programs and designing the algorithms. Who is setting the terms of the research? Who is deciding what matters? Mainly men. That’s a problem because the world is not made up of mainly men. I received this ARC from the publisher/author in exchange for an honest review & I’m forever grateful. An ingenious police procedural with a clever twist, a delightful cast of characters paired with witty banter and relatable humour, intriguing cold case investigations - neatly sums this compelling and highly entertaining debut. I can’t wait to see what Jo Callaghan comes out with next. Idő kérdése volt, hogy a mesterséges intelligencia a krimiben is felüsse a fejét. Jo Callaghan történetében egy pilot projektet figyelhetünk meg, amelyben a rendőrök munkáját egy Okos Detektív Asszisztens segíti. Nem is az az ijesztő, hogy ez valakinek eszébe jut, hanem az, hogy ettől igazából annyira nem is állunk már messze.

The plot is superb! Seeing this team work together with very little to go on it seems like a massive task but it isn’t long before they uncover little snippets of information that lead them down a path which I think any want to be crime solver would struggle to work out. I know I certainly didn’t and I was bowled over by certain revelations. I have no idea if this book is a standalone or the first in a new crime series. I am hoping for the latter as I loved Kat as well as getting to know the team and would be great to see more of them.

Help

This has to be a strong contender for crime debut of the year - sharp, perceptive writing and a brilliant new take on the detective duo' T. M. Logan Faster, fairer, evidence-based decisions for a fraction of the cost certainly sounds attractive, but early research suggests the need for caution. So called “predictive policing” uses historical information to identify possible future perpetrators and victims, but studies have shown that the source data for this kind of modelling can be riddled with preconceptions, generating, for example, results that categorise people of colour as disproportionately “dangerous” or “lawless”. A 2016 Rand Corporation study concluded that Chicago’s “heat map” of anticipated violent crime failed to reduce gun violence, but led to more arrests in low-income and racially diverse neighbourhoods.

The pilot scheme will start with cold cases; people who have disappeared over the years, with no leads. The whole process of choosing which missing persons to concentrate on is complex in itself, and as time moves on, it becomes clear that there's far more to these cases than originally thought. I did some research and was amazed to discover that people were actively researching and piloting the use of AI in crime and became fascinated by all the debates about whether data-based algorithms could lead to fairer and more transparent policing. This opened up even more questions about how humans make decisions, and whether ‘gut instinct’ is just another word for prejudice, or, as Malcolm Gladwell argues in Blink, is the result of evidence-based decision-making processes too fast for most humans to comprehend. It fired off so many ideas in my brain, that I couldn’t wait to write a new take on the cop duo, by pairing an AI detective driven by algorithms with a human partner who makes decisions with their gut. But unfortunately, my husband was very ill, and so I didn’t start writing it until after he died in 2019. It then became a much more layered novel, as it allowed me to explore (and process) issues of love, loss and what it means to be human.

Member Reviews

This brilliant debut had me gripped the whole way through. A refreshing and different take on the police procedural genre’ Prima

Thank you Simon & Schuster UK for a digital copy of this debut novel to read and review. I loved the synopsis and early reviewers thoughts suggested this was a book not to be missed. So would I agree.Essentially In the Blink of an Eye is a police procedural, Kat and her squad conduct interviews, investigate clues and gather evidence to explain the fate of the missing men. Callaghan develops a solid mystery and I thought it played out well. There’s plenty of tension, enhanced by the anonymous perspective of a young man suffering at the hands of shadowy figures, and effective twists in the plot. For centuries men wrote our literature, our history, our travelogues, our philosophy. Virginia Woolf was not on the curriculum for my Oxford degree because she was not deemed to be of sufficient merit. The plot was so intriguing and the characters are very interesting, I do hope there is more to come with Kat.