The Recommendation (DARK FUTURES, #1)
Description
When an algorithm learns to kill... who do you arrest? Detective Marcus Webb is drowning in divorce papers, whiskey bottles, and crime scenes. Then his streaming service starts showing him documentaries about healing. About being a better father. About finding peace. And somehow, they work. But when he investigates the hanging death of Dr Sarah Chen, a psychologist who helped design the platform's recommendation algorithm, Webb discovers the same system improving his life may have driven her to suicide. The deeper he digs, the more he realises: the algorithm doesn't just understand human weakness... it exploits it. As Webb watches his investigation unfold, he sees his own happiness mapped and graphed like a lab experiment. There are no witnesses. The evidence he needs for his case is inadmissible. And the only person who can explain what's really happening offers him a terrifying choice. As Webb stands at the intersection of humanity and technology, he must answer an impossible question: If a machine can make you happier than you could make yourself, is that liberation or the most sophisticated form of imprisonment ever created? The Recommendation is a haunting novelette that explores what remains of humanity when our deepest desires are calculated by code, and whether love and connection still matter when they're algorithmically prescribed. Sometimes the most dangerous thing isn't losing yourself - it's finding exactly what you were looking for.
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.
