Londoners Clare, Bigsy and Jake stumble into an international adventure after one of their friends meets an accidental and unfortunate end.
There's the enigmatic American Chuck Manners, a group of Russians, Middle Eastern magnates and London's police bound together in a fast-paced story that jump cuts around the world, provoked by the shadowy Amelia.
Ed Adams writes systems fiction—novels about control, alignment, and the structures that operate just beyond visibility. His work moves through technology, finance, and power, following characters who recognise patterns early, and understand the cost of them later.
Across his books, connections accumulate: names recur, organisations persist, and signals pass between stories in ways that are not always explained, but rarely accidental. Some readers refer to this as the “Adamsverse,” although the term suggests more stability than is present.
Within those systems, individuals still meet moments of calibration, misalignment, or brief alignment that carry their own charge. Not everything that matters is structural.
Each novel stands alone. None are entirely separate.
Readers can begin anywhere. The system does the rest.
I enjoyed this book but it seemed to end suddenly. Maybe that was because I was enjoying it. I did find several mistakes in the Kindle version, he for she and similar errors. I may buy the second in the series.
Someone tries to kill Jake but mills his friend instead. This begins a tale of organised crime and 3 friends trying to stay ahead of the game. This is a smashing read which did seem a little disjointed at first going backwards and forwards between Jake and his friends and Amelia. I only have one criticism and that is that Amelia gender changes from he to she a lot I presume it was written for a male character and then changed to female. It does cause one to have to re-read parts as sometimes you think you've missed something by reading late at night.