This IT-themed police procedural novel was written in 2001 and is set in 2010. This made reading it in 2023 an interesting experiment in how science fiction can never be treated as prediction, because there are huge swathes of McAuley's future where the tech - and society - worked out differently. For instance, faxes were dead technology within three or four years of this book coming out. And smoking in public places was being frowned upon - and then legislated against - long before the currency of this book.

But of course, it's fiction. At some point in the book's backstory, a conjunction of disaffected hackers and terrorists sparked a war where the targets were key parts of the data infrastructure. As a result, the UK has a repressive government and strict laws on licensing databases and websites. Into this steps an embittered policeman, side lined into forensic IT work following the death of four colleagues which saw him admonished.

He becomes embroiled in an unpleasant murder which seems to have pointers to the underworld of illegal porn sites in one direction and the world of tech entrepreneurs in the other. There's a McGuffin, connected to an innovative CCTV system that one character has sold to the UK Government. And there are unsettling things in the background, such as climate change and a Metropolitan Police that seems preoccupied with internal squabbling and status.

The shortcomings in our real-world experience of the tech are offset by the p.o.v. character, who is quite well-drawn; and the urban London setting. But this makes some of the oversights a little harder to suspend disbelief over. The protagonist has some mildly homophobic views which were probably current within the Met in 2001 when the book was written, but less so by 2010. Perhaps the thing that marks out the book's age the most is the way in which the protagonist sets up a DDOS (Distributed denial Of Service) attack on a villain's website and McAuley takes four pages to describe it. Today? I think most readers would have a fairly clear idea of what a DDOS attack is, at least in outline if not in detail.

There is a major jump cut away from London in the last eighty pages or so, and the novel switches from a police procedural to a typical turn-of-the-century cyberpunk thriller, with hip street hacker kids and an exotic location, And the denouement in an uncompleted office block is something that is almost a cliché, or at least would be if this were a film. But the plot turns and the central protagonist saves this book from complete obsolescence. ( )

Well-written, near future noir, with a payoff at the end that takes on wider social issues. It made me glad not to live in Britain, with its ubiquitous CCTV network. ( )

An enjoyable read -- fast paced with a rateable main character. The rest of the character development was mediocre. ( )

More speculative and mystery than science fiction. An average story. ( )