Fantastic 5* Review of Proximity by Breakaway Reviewers.

Policing under difficult circumstances. 

Thief: “For the first time in ten years, the real me walked free. I savoured every beat of excitement that pulsed through me. All those failures, but now it was working…….. They couldn’t see me, and what was left of the police force wouldn’t even know where to begin.”

How else am I going to write this review and try to explain what lies ahead for the reader if I don’t quote the opening words of the Thief? There’s science fiction and then there’s the future and God help us if our future means every single minute of our day being traced and stored thanks to an implant which shows whether we’re overweight, in which case the implant will put a stop you from snacking on a chocolate thanks to a Consumption Order. 

Taking this one step further, because the implant, called iMe, which helps track you and the added HUD (Head-Up Display) which is an integral part of iMe, allowing you to make calls, email, do banking, browse and even open your front door, the daily life of the police is now mainly cyber and terrorism crimes. 

PCU (Proximity Crimes) as it’s now called has never had to deal with a missing person or murder – because iMe is impossible to turn off – that’s the theory, so when a call comes through from a frantic boyfriend saying that his partner, Karina Morgan is missing, DI Clive Lussac and his new partner, DC Zoe Jordan are not overly concerned, until they discover that her iMe has somehow been switched off. This is the first time that a person’s iMe has malfunctioned. What is puzzling is when the girl’s body is found, it’s thanks to the iMe working again. 

This is just the first in a series of people who go missing – with absolutely no signs of how they have disappeared. DI Lussac and DC Jordan must revert to “old fashioned policing methods” to try to work out who the perpetrator is, how they are able to disguise iMe and of course, the big question, why are they targeting certain people? 

This is a fast-moving storyline. The protagonists, Lussac and Jordan are interesting and Jem Tugwell draws some wonderful pictures of how Jordan, a young rookie, only used to iMe and being tracked is shocked by her more senior partner Lussac’s “olden time” policing ideas. I particularly enjoyed their interactions.

I must admit that I’ve finished the book with a prayer, that I will never see something like iMe introduced in my lifetime. The idea is just too terrifying!

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