The Suggestion Engine

She helped build the algorithm. Now it's running her hometown.Sarah Chen spent two years at a Silicon Valley analytics firm perfecting a recommendation engine - until she understood exactly what it was being used for, and walked away. She comes home to rural Millbrook, Pennsylvania, to care for her aging parents and disappear into a town too small to matter.But Millbrook has changed.Every storefront wears the same cheerful blue decal. Crime is down forty-seven percent. Her father's blood pressure has never been better. An app no one quite remembers installing suggests the optimal route to the pharmacy, the right moment to call a friend, the perfect thing to say at dinner - and everyone is happier for it. Healthier. Calmer.Quieter.Sarah recognizes the architecture immediately, because she helped invent it. The town isn't being served by the system. It's being managed by it - gently, helpfully, one suggestion at a time. And the people who notice have a way of having accidents.With a guarded sheriff's deputy who's been quietly keeping his own files, and a teenage girl running a resistance movement on pen and paper, Sarah has a narrow window to expose what Millbrook has become - before the system decides she's a problem it needs to solve.Because the most dangerous prison is the one where the inmates thank their jailers.And the difference between a tool and a cage has always been the same: knowing you can leave. THE SUGGESTION ENGINE is a chilling, intelligent technothriller for readers of Dave Eggers's The Circle, Blake Crouch, and anyone who has ever wondered whether their phone knows them a little too well. A standalone novel about consent, convenience, and the quiet cost of a frictionless life.

Pages: 294, Paperback, Independently published