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Stop All the Clocks: A Novel
A thrilling debut that explores the profound mysteries of life in the digital age.
Mona Veigh was feeling burnt out from the tech world—and life in general. Following the death of her unconventional colleague, Avram Parr, and the collapse of her AI company that left her a hefty cash-out, Mona retreated to her home on Roosevelt Island, free to toss her phone into the East River and curl up with a good book, forever.
However, strange occurrences intrude on Mona's permanent vacation and thrust her back into the world. Colleagues from her former company begin to track her down and let on that there may be more to Avram Parr’s death than meets the eye. They all seem to believe that Mona possesses the crucial information about Avram that they seek, or, if not Mona, then her creation, Hildegard—an oracle-like bot that produces eerily prophetic poetry.
Stop All the Clocks is a rare literary thriller where the crux of the whodunnit isn't a person but modern life itself, where the conspiracy lies within the dark magic of digital technology—the ones and zeroes to which everyone is beholden—and the motive is the beguiling power of the words when you press play.
Mona Veigh was feeling burnt out from the tech world—and life in general. Following the death of her unconventional colleague, Avram Parr, and the collapse of her AI company that left her a hefty cash-out, Mona retreated to her home on Roosevelt Island, free to toss her phone into the East River and curl up with a good book, forever.
However, strange occurrences intrude on Mona's permanent vacation and thrust her back into the world. Colleagues from her former company begin to track her down and let on that there may be more to Avram Parr’s death than meets the eye. They all seem to believe that Mona possesses the crucial information about Avram that they seek, or, if not Mona, then her creation, Hildegard—an oracle-like bot that produces eerily prophetic poetry.
Stop All the Clocks is a rare literary thriller where the crux of the whodunnit isn't a person but modern life itself, where the conspiracy lies within the dark magic of digital technology—the ones and zeroes to which everyone is beholden—and the motive is the beguiling power of the words when you press play.
- GenresFiction
240 pages, Hardcover
Published June 3, 2025
4 people are currently reading
119 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 27, 2025
In the cerebral literary thriller Stop All the Clocks, Mona Veigh is a brilliant technologist and poetry scholar who created an AI program, named Hildegard, that she has trained to recognize and write poetry. After the mysterious death of her colleague Avram Parr, whose company acquired Hildegard, Mona has renounced technology and isolated herself on Roosevelt Island. When Mona starts to suspect there might be more to Parr’s death than meets the eye, she reenters society and embarks on a quest to discover the truth.
The book deftly explores the very real tension between humanity and technology. Various characters in the book represent these two forces, with Mona in the middle struggling to make sense of the impact of her creation in a world of techno villains and disruptors.
As Mona gets more deeply enmeshed in the Parr mystery, she revisits favorite poems as sources of comfort. These contrast with Hildegard’s cold and eerie poetry output that appears throughout the book. Poetry and language play a strong role in Mona’s internal conflict between what is truly real and what is just pattern recognition and code.
The narrative shifts between a page-turning mystery and abstract philosophical musings on poetry, language, technology, and humanity. It’s a thought provoking and original story, but at times dense and difficult to interpret, so it didn’t always land for me.
Thank you to Skyhorse Publishing for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
The book deftly explores the very real tension between humanity and technology. Various characters in the book represent these two forces, with Mona in the middle struggling to make sense of the impact of her creation in a world of techno villains and disruptors.
As Mona gets more deeply enmeshed in the Parr mystery, she revisits favorite poems as sources of comfort. These contrast with Hildegard’s cold and eerie poetry output that appears throughout the book. Poetry and language play a strong role in Mona’s internal conflict between what is truly real and what is just pattern recognition and code.
The narrative shifts between a page-turning mystery and abstract philosophical musings on poetry, language, technology, and humanity. It’s a thought provoking and original story, but at times dense and difficult to interpret, so it didn’t always land for me.
Thank you to Skyhorse Publishing for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
June 2, 2025
Mona is the creator of an AI designed to write poetry, and her company is acquired by venture capitalist Avram Parr, who has an intriguing portfolio. After the purchase, Mona retreats into seclusion (I too would like to throw my phone into the river), but she's drawn back when Parr dies under suspicious circumstances.
The book quickly evolved into an engaging thriller, taking unexpected turns in both its plot direction and the business sector it explored. Despite the AI elements mentioned in the plot description, this is definitely a human story.
Despite her sarcasm and dry wit, Mona was an enjoyable point-of-view character. Her musings on the depth and importance of language and poetry were fascinating, especially when another character later explored these themes from a very different perspective. She might have inspired me to start reading poetry!
The Hildegard AI’s occasional poems between book chapters were an interesting addition and quite unsettling.
There was a diverse cast of characters that kept me guessing about their motives. Although he played a minor role, I grew quite fond of Mona's neighbor Del. Parr and the detective were also particularly interesting and well-developed characters.
Some readers may find some of the procedures described upsetting, but we the reader are not “present” for them.
Thank you to Skyhorse Publishing for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
The book quickly evolved into an engaging thriller, taking unexpected turns in both its plot direction and the business sector it explored. Despite the AI elements mentioned in the plot description, this is definitely a human story.
Despite her sarcasm and dry wit, Mona was an enjoyable point-of-view character. Her musings on the depth and importance of language and poetry were fascinating, especially when another character later explored these themes from a very different perspective. She might have inspired me to start reading poetry!
The Hildegard AI’s occasional poems between book chapters were an interesting addition and quite unsettling.
There was a diverse cast of characters that kept me guessing about their motives. Although he played a minor role, I grew quite fond of Mona's neighbor Del. Parr and the detective were also particularly interesting and well-developed characters.
Some readers may find some of the procedures described upsetting, but we the reader are not “present” for them.
Thank you to Skyhorse Publishing for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
June 4, 2025
Tech tycoon conspiracy with brimming with poetry, Christian mystics, and mad science. Quote from my full review on 'And another man' Substack:
"Mona is moonlighting as a gumshoe after getting out of the tech industry. She can afford her isolation after selling her large-language model, Hildegard, to Avram Parr, an idealist tech tycoon who finds language to be the missing piece to his other biohacking umbrella companies. The two make an unlikely pair, partly bonded by their status as people who are often the smartest people in the room, they share similar gray-green eyes and black hair, and a proclivity for enchanted naming conventions. Parr’s company, Proserpina, invokes the Roman myth of an existence tethered to the dead and the living. It’s more on the nose than Theranos’ portmanteau but equally sinister. Kumin captures the debilitating real-world feeling that for all our surrounding technology, a utopian human condition remains unsolved. Mona’s version of New York City is experienced as a series of isolated corporate spaces, tethered by pedestrian traffic and the most humbling of city transit services, the Roosevelt Island tramway. It gets to the point that walking into a sex shop in Times Square spirals her into an existential dilemma, 'What am I looking for here? Mona asked herself. What am I running toward, what am I trying to escape?'"
"Mona is moonlighting as a gumshoe after getting out of the tech industry. She can afford her isolation after selling her large-language model, Hildegard, to Avram Parr, an idealist tech tycoon who finds language to be the missing piece to his other biohacking umbrella companies. The two make an unlikely pair, partly bonded by their status as people who are often the smartest people in the room, they share similar gray-green eyes and black hair, and a proclivity for enchanted naming conventions. Parr’s company, Proserpina, invokes the Roman myth of an existence tethered to the dead and the living. It’s more on the nose than Theranos’ portmanteau but equally sinister. Kumin captures the debilitating real-world feeling that for all our surrounding technology, a utopian human condition remains unsolved. Mona’s version of New York City is experienced as a series of isolated corporate spaces, tethered by pedestrian traffic and the most humbling of city transit services, the Roosevelt Island tramway. It gets to the point that walking into a sex shop in Times Square spirals her into an existential dilemma, 'What am I looking for here? Mona asked herself. What am I running toward, what am I trying to escape?'"
June 14, 2025
Not a 'good read.' Thin, underdeveloped characters acting in ways that you don't quite understand because you don't really know them. Weak relationship dynamics and a plot that feels hacky and has-been. There is no satisfying ending in this one. The "novel" thing about this book is the idea of AI created poetry, but it does nothing to add to the enjoyment of a sub par story. Not impressed at all.
Read
September 1, 2025dnfed at ~35 pages — plot didn’t really draw me in and the writing style wasn’t for me
April 29, 2025
My review for this book was published by Library Journal in April 2025:
After graduating college, Mona Veigh founded a company that combined her two primary interests, AI and poetry: her product is Hildegard, a “supervised learning system” that takes in all of the world’s great works of verse, then produces its unique brand of poetry that’s fluent in the “space between the words.” Her ingenious model attracted the attention of Avram Parr, a mercurial entrepreneur who had never read one line of poetry before paying a princely sum to absorb Hildegard into his own company, Prosperpina. Why Parr wanted Hildegard or what he would use it for never concerned Mona. Suddenly rich beyond imagining and living in relative seclusion in her Roosevelt Island condo in Manhattan, she now spends her days walking around aimlessly and leading a two-person poetry appreciation club with her neighbor. But then Parr kills himself -- maybe, probably -- Mona becomes convinced that she’s being followed, and would-be allies keep turning up dead. In this literary thriller, the everlasting benefits of poetry have never been more important. VERDICT Debut novelist Kumin, a student of both literature and philosophy, puts them both to good use in this techno-linguistic conspiracy thriller that stakes its claim as a Neuromancer for the 21st century.
Copyright ©2025 Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. Reprinted with permission.
After graduating college, Mona Veigh founded a company that combined her two primary interests, AI and poetry: her product is Hildegard, a “supervised learning system” that takes in all of the world’s great works of verse, then produces its unique brand of poetry that’s fluent in the “space between the words.” Her ingenious model attracted the attention of Avram Parr, a mercurial entrepreneur who had never read one line of poetry before paying a princely sum to absorb Hildegard into his own company, Prosperpina. Why Parr wanted Hildegard or what he would use it for never concerned Mona. Suddenly rich beyond imagining and living in relative seclusion in her Roosevelt Island condo in Manhattan, she now spends her days walking around aimlessly and leading a two-person poetry appreciation club with her neighbor. But then Parr kills himself -- maybe, probably -- Mona becomes convinced that she’s being followed, and would-be allies keep turning up dead. In this literary thriller, the everlasting benefits of poetry have never been more important. VERDICT Debut novelist Kumin, a student of both literature and philosophy, puts them both to good use in this techno-linguistic conspiracy thriller that stakes its claim as a Neuromancer for the 21st century.
Copyright ©2025 Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. Reprinted with permission.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews