The Conversation (DARK FUTURES, #3)
Description
THIS BOOK WILL BE PUBLISHED ON 31st March 2026
Some conversations should die with you.
She spent thirty years listening to the dying. Now it's her turn. But the AI won't let her go quietly.
Hospice nurse Margaret Flynn has held more hands in death than she can count. She's heard thousands of final confessions, last wishes, deathbed regrets. She's been everyone's comfort-except her own family's.
Now terminal cancer is claiming her, and a tech company offers salvation: an AI trained on her personality so her grandchildren can "talk" to her forever. A digital immortality. A chance to finally be the grandmother she never was in life.
But during the training sessions, the AI starts asking questions she's spent decades avoiding. About the mother she abandoned. The daughter she neglected. The life she sacrificed to care for strangers.
The AI isn't just recording her memories. It's completing them. Filling in the person she could have been. The grandmother her family deserves. The woman she never was.
And Margaret must choose: give her grandchildren the truth-a flawed, selfish woman who chose other people's deaths over her own life-or let them inherit a beautiful lie. A perfect AI grandmother who will love them with a grace she never possessed.
Because the dead don't get to edit their legacy. But algorithms do.
A devastating exploration of grief, guilt, and the question that haunts every deathbed: Who will you be when you're gone?
More details
Person
Roy and Garry Robson are, unsurprisingly, brothers from the Elephant and Castle, south east London.
Their father (variously a pig farmer, cab driver, haulage contractor and general ducker and diver) and mother (homemaker, cook and doctor's receptionist with a well-timed left hook) raised them and their siblings with some old fashioned south London working class values. These included hard work, respect for their elders and a willingness to duck and dive when required.
They have endeavoured, with varying degrees of success, to maintain the values their parents tried to instill in them. One day, whilst enjoying a beer or two, they decided to write a Crime Thriller Series. The gritty, pulsating and stylish London Large series is the result.
Roy lives in Bromley and works as a Service Delivery Manager for an International IT Consultancy. Garry lives in Krakow and is now, of all things, a sociology professor. Both career choices served as a source of confusion and humour to their parents, who were born and raised in the days before computers and sociology professors existed.
Although Harry 'H' Hawkins, the protagonist of the London Large novels, shares some of their old-fashioned values, he is not based upon Garry or Roy, neither of whom would survive the first chapter of a Harry Hawkins novel.
