Artificial Intelligence has been credited and blamed for many things: Revolutionizing medicine. Easing business communications. Hallucinating events. Destroying new author’s careers. The whole Skynet thing. Would you trust it to find your true love?
L.M. Chilton seems to have his fingers on the pulse of the zeitgeist in his writing, and his third book, I Think We Should Kill Other People, is no exception. Hazel and Marc met as part of a reality show that used AI to find a soulmate. But Hazel dumped Marc at the altar, and now she’s stranded with his obnoxious rich family at a small, deserted, snowed-in airport in Norway. When the show’s producer is murdered in the bathroom after threatening to use his footage to expose the family, Hazel realizes she’s locked in with a murderer. Can the AI help Hazel unmask the killer, or will she become the next victim?
I Think We Should Kill Other People is written in first-person, present tense, and goes back and forth between the fraught airport scenes and Hazel and Marc’s courtship. A bottle hostess with a convict father, Hazel seems an unlikely match for Marc, and their dates are a little awkward. Even worse, a person in a red coat seems to be stalking and threatening Hazel when she’s with Marc.
Chilton does a great job describing the eerie, cold, deserted Norwegian airport, and I will never look at a baggage claim conveyer belt the same way again. The book is fast-paced and funny, delivering the goods that readers expect from sarcastic thrillers about serial murders. He sneaks in commentary about rich people getting away with everything while taking over the world, which is always appreciated. He holds a mirror to AI. There’s a fun twist at the end. However, I was disappointed by the reveal of the killer. While thematically the motive made sense, the degrees of separation made it emotionally unfulfilling.
Since dating apps seem to have destroyed romance in the real world (more choices are not always better), and younger generations are uncoupled as never before, maybe AI is the answer. It can give Gen Z their soulmates while it steals our jobs, our homes, and our hopes for the future. In the meantime, we have authors like Chilton to keep us entertained.
Thanks to Gallery for the book in exchange for an honest review.
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