Journalist Gil Peck is back; in therapy, married to Jess - now editor of the Financial Chronicle - and still driven by the need to prove a point that he can't quite identify.
Yet all is not well at home. Jess is fed up with Gil's obsession with his job, and she's kicked him out of their home.
But Gil has never let anything get in the way of a scoop. He and Jess have landed the interview of a lifetime with the Prime Minister, Stella Barnsbury, for the podcast they co-host, and Gil has no intention of missing it.
During the interview, Barnsbury begins to pale, her coughing intensifying before she finally collapses.
Within 48 hours, the Prime Minister is dead.
Gil is used to landing the biggest stories. But as the last person to see the PM alive, he's now a main character. And when foul play is confirmed, he's also a prime suspect . . .
It's my pleasure to be hosting the blog tour for The Kill Switch by Robert Peston today. Many thanks to Bonnier for my advance digital copy. received through Netgalley and to Tracy Fenton from Compulsive Readers for inviting me.
The Kill Switch is the third book in Robert Peston's Gil Peck series but the first I have read. Although there are mentions of previous events, it can easily be enjoyed as a standalone and I had no problems becoming invested in the lives of the two main characters, the aforementioned Gil and his partner, Jess. The narrative is split between the pair and while it's easy to see the parallels behind Gil's background and that of Robert Peston himself, Jess is just as fully realised.
Jess is editor of the Financial Chronicle but also hosts a politics podcast with Gil. Their combined years of experience have seen them interview, report on and expose the activities and misdemeanours of politicians but even so, an extended interview with the Prime Minister, Stella Barnsbury is quite the coup. Throughout the book, Robert Peston depicts the close, entangled relationships of politicians from both sides of the House and the journalists who follow them. Jess and Stella Barnsbury go way back and indeed share a wild past that makes what unfolds here even more shocking when, just a short while into the interview, Stella becomes ill and eventually collapses.
In a post-Covid world, the fear of another virus sweeping the globe has become almost constant and when Barnsbury dies a few days later, Gil and Jess are almost immediately quarantined; as the last people to see her alive, they may also be at risk from a new, deadly disease. They receive a clean bill of health soon enough, only to discover they – and the country face an even more frightening challenge. AI is already causing concerns, of course, not least in the publishing world but here, Robert Peston examines the dangers of global superpowers and amoral multibillionaires allowing and encouraging the AI economic and social revolution to reach singularity much sooner than perhaps predicted.
Although partly a science-fiction novel featuring a chilling exploration into the way in which artificial and human intelligence could be forcibly combined, The Kill Switch feels a scarily prescient book. Fake news has been with us for years but with those controlling social media now more rich and powerful than some countries, their political ambitions seem more unstoppable than ever. Jess and Gil's investigation into the assassination of the Prime Minister becomes an unsettling metaphor for the risk to our own freedoms, with the sobering reminder that who we trust has become something we have to weigh up as being who is least likely to want to cause us harm.
The breakneck speed of the complex plot is complemented by the rich sense of place and it's here that Robert Peston's own career pays dividends as we are given a birds-eye view into the worlds of politics and journalism. There are some genuinely shocking moments in The Kill Switch but the human cost of ambition and revenge is never forgotten and there are some poignant scenes too.
The Kill Switch is an accomplished, compulsive conspiracy thriller and is one I highly recommend.
The Kill Switch is published by Bonnier, purchasing links can be found here.
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