Having secrets is dangerous. Confessing them can be fatal.
Emma’s family is coming apart at the seams. Her marriage to Hayden is
crumbling. Their 21-year-old daughter Willow is unraveling after a breakup.
Their teenage son Fred is isolated and unhappy.
So when they are offered the chance to test ClarityU—a revolutionary AI therapist built by Marcel, their widowed friend—it feels like a potential lifeline. And at first, it really does seem to help.
But there’s a hidden catch. ClarityU is dangerously addictive and Marcelcan see everything they share with it. Every confession. Every fear. Every secret.
As their most private thoughts are weaponized against them, sending
everyone Emma loves into a terrifying downward spiral, she realizes something is horribly wrong.
Suspecting Marcel is not the friend she thought, she begins to investigate.
And the deeper she digs, the clearer it becomes: she is locked in a life-and-
death battle with a man who understands exactly what she fears most.
Leaving Emma with one terrifying question—how far will she go to save
her family?
Miranda Rijks is a writer of fast-paced, twisty psychological thrillers many of which have been Amazon
bestsellers. She has an eclectic background ranging from law to running a garden centre. After surviving bone
cancer, Miranda turned to writing and is now living the dream, writing suspense novels full time. She lives in
West Sussex, England with her Dutch husband and two black Labradors and spends as much time as she can
in the Swiss Alps.
My thoughts:As AI becomes increasingly common and more and more people rely on it, I think books like this will also be more common – where AI is the villain. Although, it turns out that the real issue is the person using AI to manipulate others.
Emma and her family aren’t perfect but they are pretty normal. Her marriage to Hayden is struggling a bit, teenage son Fred is retreating into his own world and student daughter Willow is trying to move on from a break up.
Friend and AI developer Marcel offers his new therapeutic tool ClarityU to them to see if it helps. But what they can’t know is that Marcel can open the back end of the app and see everything they share. And he can re-code the app to control them. Which is super creepy.
As things spin out of control and the family becomes increasingly fragmented, can Emma with son Fred’s help, stop Marcel and his dangerous program from wrecking more havoc on their lives and others?
Clever, tense and with an out of control villain who tries to “fix” things by becoming more unhinged, this is both a scarily up to date thriller and a warning about who we trust with our data.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
