Publisher - Angry Robot

Published - Out Now

Price - £3.89 Kindle ebook £8.97 paperback

When college student Emery Driscoll is blackmailed into being a courier for a clandestine organisation, she's cut off from the neural implant community which binds the domed city of New Worth together. Her new masters exploit her rare condition which allows her to carry encoded data in her blood, and train her to transport secrets throughout the troubled city. New Worth is on the brink of Emergence - freedom from the dome - but not everyone wants to leave. Then a data drop goes bad, and Emery is caught between factions: those who want her blood, and those who just want her dead.

Our desire to be connected 24/7 perhaps has given us an unhealthy relationship with our phones - social media, maps, cooking tips, health and so much more. Stories about tech have been used by authors such as Louise Carey recently in their Inscape series. In Lauren C Teffeau’s Sf thriller Implanted we have a future set Earth riven by climate change, people forced to hide in sheltered cities for generations and so reliance on technology is great and yet danger lurks still. Unfortunately it’s very much an example of too many ideas overwhelming a story to deliver it effectively.

Emery is w working class graduate expert in data who hides a secret she hunts for this preying on women to ensure they are caught. But her latest predator created an incident that gets Emery on the radar of the police but also a shadowy company that couriers secrets for the rich and powerful (by their blood) forced to pretend she is dead. Emery adapts to a new life and soon finds more secrets affecting the whole of her community are at stake.

In the face of it if I summarised the tale you’re probably this sounds a fairly standard action adventure thriller and indeed it follows the beats of someone recruited into a corporation and finds a conspiracy they must investigate. We have montage scenes, spying, covert behaviour and very well delivered action scenes. Unfortunately the wider plots all start running across each other and it creates a really thin read.

With Emery we first meet her on the hunt that goes wrong. Emery is very nervous and the reader thinks this is clearly her first time. Then we find out there patently is a whole series of similar missions. Just when I think this is an unusual SF novel around assault on women and the impact of trauma on victims Emery’s handler kindly finds Emery’s original attacker and the plotline is done and dusted.

Being told your death is going to be faked would also perhaps have a bigger character impact but it’s more a case of Emery going ok then. And then we find out oh it ok for you to make some contact with people you know - a simple false job perhaps would have made more sense. Indeed Emery loves her family so much we hardly see them bar the odd piece of exposition.

The pacing of the story is all over the place all the recruitment happens at super fast pace. We spend nearly a quarter of the book in spy training and then finally the conspiracy starts and that very much goes as you expect. We then add on themes of over reliance of technology, climate change and corporate power but it’s all fairly by the book.

Implanted ultimately felt unusually like it would benefit from being more than one book to allow the story to breathe. The editing decisions are feeling quite flawed here and it may have worked better with leaving some ideas out to be explored later. Sadly not a book I can recommend