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The Real-Town Murders

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About this listen

Alma is a private detective in a near-future England, a country desperately trying to tempt people away from the delights of Shine, the immersive successor to the Internet. But most people are happy to spend their lives plugged in, and the country is decaying.

Alma's partner is ill and has to be treated without fail every four hours, a task that only Alma can do. If she misses the five-minute window, her lover will die. She is one of the few not to access Shine. So when Alma is called to an automated car factory to be shown an impossible death and finds herself caught up in a political coup, she knows that getting too deep may leave her unable to get home.

What follows is a fast-paced Hitchcockian thriller as Alma evades arrest, digs into the conspiracy and tries to work out how on earth a dead body appeared in the boot of a freshly made car in a fully automated factory.

©2017 Adam Roberts (P)2017 Audible, Ltd Crime Thrillers Fiction Science Fiction Technothrillers Thriller Thriller & Suspense Crime Technology
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The beautiful bastard child of Asimov's Naked Sun and Cline's Ready Player One.

'Nuff said, really...

Fabulous. Just fabulous...

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I love i, the person reading it was great and the story deadly good. I could not recommend it more

It is a really good book

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Too much info dumping at times and as I approached the end of the book I was concerned that the author wouldn’t reveal how the body had actually got into the car.

Still, Alma is a compelling character and in quiet way very bad ass (taking out the fake nurse with a gun being pointed at her chest). I hope the author returns to Alma’s world in the future.

Narration was well done.

Info dumping

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Nothing sci-fi about this other than a few terms slapped on the top. The prose in banal and reads like a Victoria Wood sketch. The underlying ideas are unconvincing and the characters are without charm and fail to engage the reader at all. I listened to this directly after William Gibson's Pattern Recognition and even though that was set in the (now) past, it brims with ideas and futurism in ways this book could only dream of.

Dull, insipid dross

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