The Night Sessions

Religious zealots
robots with PTSD
cops decked out in frills.

Picture a world where Religion of all sorts has been sidelined, rejected, and the world is full of secular republics. A world where ex-military intelligent robots work side by side with the police. Where Palestine is a radioactive ruin after the battles of the Faith Wars between the Mulsim East and the Judeo/Christian West. Where there are two space elevators and vast soletas that stop the world from warming up under the greenhouse effect.

This is the world of The Night Sessions, where someone is killing priests and a fundamentalist Scottish Christian sect is plotting a terrorist atrocity on an unprecedented scale. Adam Ferguson is the cop tasked with investigating it all and unravelling the connections between that sect, a lay preacher in a creationist science park in New Zealand, and a rogue humanoid robot passing itself off as an injured war veteran.

MacLeod's neat near-future dystopian thriller is an arresting, thought provoking read. Whether the world would reject religion on such a scale is debatable but the story told here is rooted in a solid, well thought out scenario.

The novel is well paced, the characters well drawn and the reveal at the end is nicely handled. Great little book.