Lucas Davenport is a U.S. Marshal, but that doesn't hold any weight in the United Kingdom. He's there because years ago, in what seems like a different lifetime, he worked on computers as a hobby. Wargames, tactical simulations, predictive algorithms. And, before he sold the business for millions of dollars, crisis-response software. It's not that he doesn't approve of SHERLOCK — it's that he helped design it.

But now something's gone horribly wrong. People are dying in inexplicable ways. Some are obviously criminals, but many are not. And all the clues point back to SHERLOCK. — a supposedly perfect system that now claims that the UK would be safer if seven percent of the general population were eliminated.

But Lucas feels that everyone's being manipulated, and not by SHERLOCK. He knows how the computer works, and how it thinks, and it's not one to make judgements about what should be, and what shouldn't. Someone is gaming the system, playing to public fears, using the media and outright violence to fulfill their own agenda while blaming it all on a computer gone mad. But who? And to what end? And can Lucas figure it out before SHERLOCK does?

That... didn't work out so well [2]. Maybe I'll try again next year [3].

When it fell through I had about two weeks to come up with everything from scratch, which isn't too bad: the early covers were done in the space of literally a few hours. On the other hand, a lot of the early covers are crap [4], and I wanted to do something that was reasonably good [5].

So I fell back on the same thing I did a few years ago: co-authorships with long-dead authors. But instead of Classic Authors — Shakespeare, Dickens, and so on — I'd go with the horror or sci-fi authors of the time. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes. H.P Lovecraft and the Cthulhu mythos. Other... authors. I figured I'd get to them when I got to them. And I guess I did [6].

This one is more of a modern take on Sherlock. It's not a crossover with the classic detective, and it's not a crossover with the Benedict Cumberbach modern take on the same detective [7]. It's set in the standard Lucas-verse, with Sherlock acknowledged as a fictional character after which the British authorities name a crime-fighting computer.

I mean, seriously, if they did have a super-computer doing what the jacket text claims, they would name it Sherlock [8]. They'd pretty much have to [9]. I wouldn't be completely surprised if MI6 has a computer somewhere named after James Bond.

As for the synopsis itself... it's okay. It's not great. It's not very funny, and I want these all to have some humor in them. Instead it's the dry humor of "The concept is ridiculous" and not the the pants-on-head bonkers of "Cthulhu's been stabbed with a butter knife..." or "On a routine trip to the Sun..." or other insanity.

I also wanted the computer to (mis)quote a classic Holmes line, saying, "When you eliminate the guilty, whomever remains, however suspect, must be innocent." I just couldn't get it to fit [10]. Ah well.