✍️ Written by: RR Haywood
🏷️ Genre: Sci-fi
🗓️ Published: 01 March 2023
📄 Pages: 524
🧐 My rating: ★★★★★ (5 stars)

When nearly every person on the planet becomes frozen a small group of survivors must navigate the darkest sides of human behaviour while learning about the creation of the world's first fully self-aware Artificial Intelligence.

In London, Yelena is trapped in a room after being sex-trafficked from Romania, and Alfie has one more drop to make then he's free of drug dealing forever.

In New York, Detective Joe Stephens is working a case. Life has worn him down. He's ready to end it. Poppy is a film-maker desperate to never go back to the UK, and Tripal is a clerk in a 7-Eleven that has a secret. A secret that might be connected to why every human being on the planet just froze.

What a fantastic book DELIO is. It's superbly written, and the characters are great. DELIO covers lots of dark topics, but with a twist of true British humour that made me laugh out loud on multiple occasions. This book isn't for those that dislike foul language, but I personally liked it in this book. It was appropriate for the situation they were in, and unlike some of the books I read, the characters felt more real as a result.

As I understand it, RR Haywood is an ex police officer here in the UK, and I think that experience comes across in his writing. As I said above, DELIO covers a number of very dark topics, but he manages to inject a healthy amounts of humour throughout.

The story is gripping from the outset, and Haywood does a fantastic job of humanising DELIO, the AI in this book. The way DELIO manipulates everyone around her is, in equal measure, fascinating and petrifying (could a real AI do that one day?!)

The standout character for me is Poppy. I absolutely loved her and thought she was hilarious. I can't wait to read the next books in this series - I'll also be checking out some of Haywood's other works too, so please keep an eye out for those reviews soon.

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