Police procedural (with added AI) set in NUNEATON

24th June 2024

Leave No Trace by Jo Callaghan, police procedural (with added AI) set in NUNEATON.

This is the second outing for AIDE (Artificial Intelligence Detecting Entity) Lock – the world’s first AI Detective, and follows on from In the Blink of an Eye. It can be read as a standalone. AIDE is an AI hologram, brought to life as a “healthy, annoyingly handsome male in his mid-thirties”. It (and just perhaps it should be he/him) works alongside DCS Kat Frank. Now is deemed to be the right time for it to go out into the wide world and work with real people, on a real case. It is a bit like a walking encyclopedia, with the charm of a robot (which actually comes in handy because he calls a spade a spade without reference to social norms) and he can process data at an incredible rate.

A body has been found on Mount Judd, Nuneaton, (technically not a mountain as Lock points out, standing at 610M, a spoil tip from a former quarry). The concerning factor is that the victim was crucified, with his ears cut off and left to perish, naked, in freezing temperatures during the unforgiving Winter months.

Clearly the killer is still free to roam and soon another body – similarly staged but this time with the eyes gouged out – turns up on farmland, just 7 miles away from the first killing. It looks like the work of a serial killer….

I enjoyed both novels so far in the series, they are well paced and on-goingly revisit developments and conclusions in plot development, so that clarity of progression is always a given. There is a bit about Kat’s home life and the effects of her job on her son Cam (who is trying to carve his own life at University). There are the issues surrounding press intrusion which can challenge how police go about their investigations. And, of course, the issues surrounding AI are subtly explored, which proves to be a positive and unusual thrust in this novel.

A good series and I am looking forward to the next one.

Tina for the TripFiction Team

Catch the author on Twitter X @jocallaghanKat 

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