Carey has previously co-written novels with her parents Linda and Mike Carey (the last famed for his The Girl With All the Gifts from 2014), and this, her first solo effort and the start of a trilogy, is a cool, classy cyberpunk riff on the cold war spy thriller.
Following three successful fantasy novels written with her parents Mike and Linda Carey, Louise Carey switches genres with the hi-tech, cyberpunk-flavoured Inscape (Gollancz, £14.99). The setting is a post-meltdown future world where society is governed by competing technology companies barricaded in affluent “affiliated zones”, outside which are the bandit-riddled “unaffiliated zones”. Tanta works as a trainee agent for the InTech company, and her first assignment is to lead a team into an unaffiliated zone to retrieve stolen software files.