The perilous, isolated continent of Antarctica. Newtopia City, two kilometers beneath the ice. And something, stealthily, growing.
It's 2063, decades after magic returned to our world. Leeth, raised at the Institute for Paranormal Dysfunction, is now a government assassin. But sent to Antarctica, to the city run by the world's first truly sentient AI, her new mission may be impossible. In the city it controls, under its all-seeing eyes, she must somehow find and destroy both the AI itself, and the technology it stole.
But how do you kill an AI that has successfully hidden and protected itself for years, while secretly running a global megacorporation?
Why did the AI steal technology for rewriting human memories? Why is it holding four young gifted orphans in a hidden research facility? And why has it begun inexplicably crashing?
But when powerful entities reach out from the shadows, and a primeval land awakens to magic, things are guaranteed to get strange ? deadly strange.
Autorentext
Luke J. Kendall failed to drown on five separate occasions on Sydney's northern beaches. For 30 years he worked in the IT R&D field, very happily married to an adventurous mediaeval scholar 22 years his senior, until her death in December 2014.
He likes really long form fiction ? like Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, or C. E. Murphy's urban shaman series. His own, The Leeth Dossier, is set in our world in a 'mixtopian' near future a few decades after magic's return. Character-driven by its female lead ? who is innocent, loyal, and deadly ? it blends hard science with fantasy, psychological horror, humour, and action. He has self-published Wild Thing (2015), Harsh Lessons (2016), Shadow Hunt (2017), and Violent Causes (2019), and Lost Girl (Dec, 2020), book 1 in the new series arc.