Safe State (2025)
It’s 2058. Six years ago, the Winter of Disconnect shattered Britain and stole Jas McDonnell’s childhood.
Now Jas manages survivor’s guilt with electromagnetic emotional correction, artificially induced reality, and good old chemical escape. She’s holed up in Louth, a decaying market town barricaded against the slaver gangs outside, lorded over by a sable-robed mayor.
Jas just wants to be safe, so she can scrape a living under the unblinking lenses of the storybirds, hoping to trigger their interest algorithms and stream a few moments of her life to some neuman voyeur in the transhumanist playground of Grand London.
But when a shipment of illegal bio-fabricators arrives, the mayor seizes a chance to play the hero, promising to unleash a cybernetic swarm that will spread law and order beyond the barricades. Suddenly, safety has never felt more dangerous.
Who sent UN-sanctioned biotech to a Lincolnshire backwater? Why now? And why is Jas the only one asking questions?
To uncover the truth, Jas will have to risk everything – her livelihood, her friends, her life. Because the posthuman demigods in the capital are definitely watching now. And maybe it’s not the fame-seeking mayor they’ve noticed.
Maybe it’s her.
Safe State is a grimy cyberpunk thriller for readers who love the deep immersion of William Gibson’s The Peripheral, the bleakly real tech extrapolations of Daniel Suarez’s Change Agent, and the dark British cynicism of Charles Stross’s classic Accelerando. In an age where we fear what our machines and AI will become, Safe State asks: shouldn't we be more afraid of what we’ll become ourselves?
Where to Buy:
No Good Deed (2019)
Bruce Thorne knows the rumours aren’t true. After all, he started most of them.
He doesn’t want to be Crow any more. But when he agrees to track down a friend’s missing daughter, he finds a trail of deception that threatens to drag him back into the underworld he thought he’d escaped.
Thorne’s used to being haunted by his past. But now it’s hunting him, that’s different. Maybe that legend hasn’t faded fast enough. Because he’s about to discover that it’s not just the girl’s survival at stake. It’s his own.
An intricate plot set in motion by the compelling opening scene unravels towards an inevitable, multi-sided showdown. With its thinking–feeling hero and relatable supporting cast, No Good Deed is an enjoyably different kind of thriller. Highly recommended!" (Amazon 5-Star Review Nov 2021)