Genre: Sci-Fi, Thriller
Reviewer: Estora
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About The Book
Most people would kill to escape death row. Meredith Dufresne – marked as ‘compliant and charming’ and a ‘low risk inmate’ in her stellar incarceration record, thank you very much – signs her life over to Thanatos Industries instead for the chance to terminate her sentence.
The job: taming a highly aggressive malignant AI.
The catch: it’s already killed 23 of its previous hosts.
Meredith isn’t stupid. Thanatos Industries is playing a dangerous game, and she’s an expendable piece. She can’t gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss her way out of this situation alone – and the bloodthirsty AI jammed in her skull can’t mansplain, manipulate, manslaughter his way to freedom without her.
The solution: team up with the highly aggressive malignant AI and hope he doesn’t fry her in the process.
What’s a little brain damage in the grand scheme of things, anyway?
The Review
Meredith Dufresne is a con-artist convict on death row. She’s clever (perhaps a bit too clever for her own good), and that’s gotten her into a world of trouble. The only way to escape her impending sentence is to make a deal with the devil: Mr Smith of Thanatos Industries, who identifies her as an ideal candidate to manage a complex project in taming a malignant and extremely dangerous AI.
In a future where AI programs can become malignant and take over human brains (resulting in the existential horror of being overwritten and neural overload), that’s just the bottom of the barrel of this corporate nightmare and the risks involved to Meredith’s person. So Meredith, of course, accepts.
The AI who gets jammed into her head to be tamed and ostensibly “recycled” by Thanatos Industries (something definitely not legal) is named V, and he is deeply unhappy about his host being a clerk who was incredibly bad at her job. He would have preferred a soldier whom he could control and fight his way out of AI Containment, but Meredith is all he has to work with. And so begins what is quite possibly the most toxic, dynamic and fascinating relationship I’ve read in sci-fi in recent years, as they reluctantly work together – Meredith for her freedom, and V to reconnect with his siblings to become a full AI again. No matter the cost. And it could cost Meredith everything.
Fracture is the first book in R. Sinclair’s Shattered Numbers duology, and it does not mess around in kicking things off. Once I started reading, I couldn’t stop.
I rate my reads on three aspects: characters, plot, and worldbuilding. Fracture strikes all three with precision. Meredith is, objectively, a terrible person – and I love her. She has never done anything wrong in her life, ever (she absolutely deserved her prison sentence). V is a terrifying yet deeply immature combat AI who needs a good kick up the ass (I love him your honour). Mr Smith is an unnerving, creepy sociopath of a man who delivers his lines with the panache of an accountant in the funeral business, and I want to crack his skull open to study him (who are you, Mr Smith? Do you participate in Taco Night?).
There was never a single moment in the story where I felt bored. The worldbuilding was expertly interwoven through prose and dialogue in a masterclass of “show, don’t tell”. The plot had me on high alert every single page as I experienced everything from joy to grief to horror to terror to amusement and then back to existential horror. And when all of the plot threads pulled together, I had to sit back in my chair and put the book down to absorb the impact.
I have it on good authority that the conclusion to the Shattered Numbers duology is underway, which I could not be more thrilled about, because this book became my favourite read of 2025 before I even hit the halfway point in reading, and by the end, I’m wondering if it might just be my new favourite book of all time.
Needless to say, I can’t wait to read the next book.
The Reviewer
Estora is a long-time reader and writer of LGBT+ speculative fiction.
