Whole Wide World (Hardcover)

When a girl is slowly, horribly murdered as a sick piece of performance art relayed by WebCams to the world, the undersized detective-inspector narrator becomes obsessed with this case. Though disgraced and stuck in the backwater of the Met's former Information Technology Unit (eclipsed by much sexier IT squads), he doggedly keeps following leads--including red herrings planted by hostile colleagues.

The killing connects to international porn barons, to the twilight world of thuggish "security" firms and contract killers, and to SF hardware secrets of the omnipresent street cameras that allow automatic 24/7 surveillance of absolutely anyone. Who is the "Avenger" who taunts the narrator with e-mail routed through anonymous data havens in prosperous, unregulated Cuba? Meanwhile, atrocities of the recent InfoWar--when data terrorists wreaked havoc on the City--still cast a long, unfair shadow over his career.

When this crime's deeper motives and implications become clear, there's further frustration. Certain villains are beyond British law, or above it. Even the UK government invokes all its powers of censorship to keep the lid on. It's entirely against orders that our DI hero flies to Cuba for a finale of high-tech shenanigans and violent action.

Despite the bleak background of Whole Wide World, there's a thoroughly satisfying outcome. A good, tough and thoughtful SF thriller. --David Langford

Review
'This is the big one. Fast, intense and right on the edge of the headlines.' Greg Bear 'Paul McAuley pulls off that rare balancing act of exploring big concepts while telling an absorbing and entertaining story' New Scientist 'Usually you get ideas or voice. With McAuley you get both - in spades. Without question the most exciting of Britain's new-edge writers' Michael Marshall Smith

Near-future police thriller from the author of such significant SF yarns as The Secret of Life (2001) and the far-future Confluence Trilogy. As the UK slowly recovers from the effects of the InfoWar-electronic/computer devastation and street violence promulgated by a mysterious alliance of external terrorists and internal insurrectionists-millions of cameras connected to the smart computer system ADESS keep London completely under surveillance. John, a drunken, despairing detective, loathed and despised by many of his colleagues for apparent cowardice during the InfoWar, bears various nicknames (his fellow officers, disparaging his stature, call him "Minimum"; to his sometime girlfriend Julie, he's "Dixon," an old-time bobby, unarmed and on foot, patrolling a community where he knows everybody). Despite being sidelined into the near-defunct police computer unit T12, he's drawn into the torture/murder of performance artist Sophie Booth, the deed done before a live Webcam by someone wearing a Margaret Thatcher mask. John suspects a previous acquaintance, the oleaginous, psychotic computer whiz Barry Deane, who unfortunately has a cast-iron alibi: in anything-goes Cuba, he was running porn Web sites (illegal in the UK) for his Maltese mafia bosses. But why did Sophie Booth's murderer strip the hard drives from her computers? What was Anthony Booth, Sophie's fabulously rich uncle and developer of the ADESS system, doing in Sophie's flat? And how could Sophie apparently vanish from ADESS's purview at will? A rare combination of soft-boiled hero, gut-churning crime, official puritanism, and commercial arrogance, whose chilling, all-too-believable backdrop will be instantly recognized by anyone familiar with the UK's already prevalent CCTV schemes. (Kirkus Reviews)

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