Harkaway’s fourth novel starts with a dystopian high-tech surveillance state and unfolds in several literary dimensions, from political thriller to character study to puzzle. After Diana Hunter, a suspected subversive, dies in government custody, Mielikki Neith, a special inspector, is assigned to investigate. As she listens to the neural recordings of Hunter’s interrogation, she’s soon caught up in the prisoner’s story-telling skills. Like Scheherazade reborn, Hunter told spell-binding tales to stave off a foreordained end, but between the accounts of an Athenian financier and a shark, a Carthaginian alchemist, and an Ethiopian painter creating a video game, Neith catches glimpses of another Diana Hunter, and of herself, and only then does the true nature of the situation start to become clear. Harkaway is the author of the post-apocalyptic The Gone-Away World, the spy thriller Angelmaker, and the superhero-creation origin-story Tigerman.