The Peripheral

Flynne Fisher lives in a rural corner of near-future America. Her brother Burton, a veteran of the Marines' Haptic Recon unit, hands her his well-paid job, which looks like testing a video game. She takes it without much thought.

The work has her steering a remote body through a strangely empty London, and there she sees what appears to be a murder. The game turns out to be nothing of the kind. That London is real, roughly seventy years ahead of Flynne's own time, in a future where a slow catastrophe called the Jackpot has killed most of humanity.

In the future city, the killing draws in Wilf Netherton, a publicist, along with the wealthy and powerful people around him. The technology that lets people operate bodies across time also exposes Flynne and her family. They become targets in both eras.

The chapters alternate between the two timelines, so the reader watches the danger build on each side of the link. It is a thriller about conspiracy and inequality, and about what it costs to reach into another world. It opens the Jackpot series, which continues with Agency.