BUY 'AI & I '+ GET '3 Seconds in Bogotá' FREE! 2 x paperbacks

2 x paperbacks

Most people return from South America with a dodgy stomach and a hemp bracelet.

Mark Playne came back with a nail-biting true-life thriller.

3 Seconds in Bogotá is a true account of the wrong taxi, the wrong part of town, and the wrong time of night in Pablo Escobar's Colombia. Taut, fast and genuinely hard to put down.

Then, thirty years later, he turned the same forensic instincts on something rather closer to home.

AI & I takes the Socratic method, applies it to an artificial intelligence system, and proceeds to ask the sort of questions that polite society has been quietly discouraged from asking. What really causes COVID symptoms, and are spike proteins real or a myth? The AI, to its credit, answers. The result reads like a cross-examination, in a courtroom drama with the reader cast as the jury.

Together, the books make a quietly devastating pair. The first reminds us that instianct, clear thinking and decisiveness can get us out of any situation, however grave. The second suggests we may need all three considerably closer to home.

One will keep you up because you cannot stop reading. The other will keep you up for rather different reasons.