THE INTRUSIONS

Think the life you live online is secret and secure? Think again.

Still facing awkward questions and possible legal action from internal affairs over their handling of their last case in Eleven Days (2013), DI Geneva Miller and DI Jack Carrigan, of London’s Metropolitan Police, face another aborning nightmare when Madison Carter reports that someone drugged both her and her German-born housemate, Anna Becker, an aspiring actress, at The Last Good Kiss, a nightclub they both frequented, and kidnapped Anna. Pulled off the missing person case to investigate a murder, Miller realizes that the victim is Anna Becker, her throat surgically punctured and her body carefully posed after she was pumped full of drugs designed not so much to control as to torment her. The initial focus of Miller and Carrigan’s inquiries on the Milgram, the youth hostel where Anna and Madison both lived, is sharpened once they connect Anna’s murder to the disappearance of Milgram resident Katrina Eliot after she left a bowling alley the year before. Following the slender leads they unearth slowly and methodically, they examine the victims’ links to a temporary employment agency, a murder years ago on a beach in Bali, and, most chillingly, their online activity. Both of the victims, along with hundreds of others, have been subjected to spying by someone who’s hacked their computers, taken control of their cameras and databases, and turned their private lives into commodities for sale to other like-minded voyeurs. As Miller and Carrigan’s pursuit gathers momentum, each new lead falls short of explaining everything but pulls them onward inexorably to the next.

A paranoid, deeply unsettling page-turner best read on a digital device capable of tracking every eye movement.