In the near future, self-driving cars have become mandatory in the UK. When a hacker seizes control of eight vehicles at once, their passengers are trapped, their location broadcast, and their fate handed to a live public vote: only one car's occupants can be saved, and the public decides who lives.
As the trial plays out on live television, the hacker begins releasing each passenger's secrets one by one — reframing a war hero, a doctor, a pregnant woman, a self-made celebrity and others as more or less "deserving" of rescue in the eyes of an audience that thinks it's making a moral choice. Detective Inspector Cade Jenkins races to identify the hacker and stop the countdown before all eight cars crash, while the investigation exposes uncomfortable truths about the driverless-car industry itself and the assumptions baked into its safety algorithms.
John Marrs builds the novel around a version of the trolley problem played out as public spectacle, using short chapters and multiple points of view to keep the pace relentless. It functions as a standalone technological thriller and is loosely connected to Marrs's The One.