A new year and a new pile of books to read – for pleasure, for reviewing, for discussion at my Royal Institution Fiction Lab book group. For the latter, we’re taking a look at Pandora’s Sisters by Michael Stephen Fuchs.

The book was discovered in a second-hand shop by one of the regular Labliterati, Dom Stiles, a relentless collector of obscure science-related novels. It looks like a standard lab lit thriller, with a hotshot female artificial intelligence specialist protagonist and a sterling back-cover description – which includes the following sentence:

“And soon after, when men in strange hats come looking for her hard drive, shooting first and never really asking any questions, she finds herself on the run – pursued by multiple squads of heavily armed religious zealots, the Feds, and worse.”

Dom had brought it into our December meeting to pass around. People smiled, murmured, groaned. Christine exclaimed, “It’s got a double helix on the cover – it can’t be all bad!”

It had me at “men in strange hats”.