#BookshelfSpotlight-‘The Cinderella Plan’ by Abi SIlver

James Salisbury, the owner of a British car manufacturer, ploughs his ‘self-drive’ car into a young family, with deadly consequences. Will the car’s ‘black box’ reveal what really happened or will the industry, poised to launch these products to an eager public, close ranks to cover things up?

James himself faces a personal dilemma. If it is proved that he was driving the car he may go to prison.   But if he is found innocent, and the autonomous car is to blame, the business he has spent most of his life building, and his dream of safer transport for all, may collapse.

Lawyers Judith Burton and Constance Lamb team up once again, this time to defend a man who may not want to go free, in a case that asks difficult questions about the speed at which technology is taking over our lives.

‘The Cinderella Plan’ is available in paperback from the Eye Books site or via Kindle Unlimited in ebook format.

It is the third in the Burton and Lamb legal thriller series, but as someone who has not read 1 and 2 -yet!- then I can say not only is it completely accessible, it doesn’t waste time establishing their relationships and past.They are both eminently relatable figures as they stand to defend James Salisbury. The CEO of SEDA car manufacturers is on trial for vehicular manslaughter but there are many intriguing issues to unpack from the horrific accident which opens the book.

Firstly, he is the CEO of a company that is marketing autonomous cars-technically, the vehicles should not be capable of an accident. There are many vested intetrests in seeing James’ ideas crash and burn-the transport minister and insurance firms have grave concerns about multi million pound payouts, traffic control and how quickly this tech can be rolled out.

Secondly,rival manufacturers, and people even closer to home may have been responsible for sabotaging the vehicle-but could an accident have actually been just that, an accident?

How far are we, as humans, prepared to outsource our decision making to technology? Whose responsibility is it when it fails and a ‘never event’ such as happens here occurs? And can someone with amnesia, damaged in the crash be held accountable when they don’t even remember what they have done?

 ‘You don’t need to play my conscience. It goes without saying that it’s an absolute
tragedy. That poor family. But two thousand fewer deaths per year, insurance premiums cut by eighty per cent.
That’s how driverless cars were sold to us, if I remember correctly. There must be some very red faces in high places right now. And the driver should not be held liable if he relinquished control. Even so, he’s going to need a good set of lawyers.’

An intriguing, occasionally terrifying (for a Luddite like myself) future glimpse into the crossover between AI and everyday life, the book is split into the accident, the roles of each of the key players before the accident and finally the courtcase. In doing this you are hit by the shock of the deaths,followed by a recreation of who the victims and their family were, deepening the emotional impact before the legal wrangling of responsibility, culpability and recompence.

With a heartbroken CEO, the public baying for blood, and shareholders snapping at their heel, the link between personal decision making and the development of autonomous cars to reduce human error, ‘The Cinderella Plan‘ examines how far tech can go in the reduction of human error. The EDR (event data recorder) and its recovery could either damn or save James.

The conversation between the lawyers and VERA (the car’s version of Siri/Alexa) is particularly thrilling as Judith tries to trick and outwit her and fails at every point,it reaffirms that the job of the functioning car is to preserve human life by acknowldegement and sensing of actual facts. There is no emotion attached to this whatsoever. It plants the seeds of doubt in the reader that James was responsible for the accident. However the guilty party is identified, 2 children have lost their lives so even in the event of Burton and Lamb winning their case, the effects of this accident are going to be lifelong as well as life altering. With the husband of an injured wife, and father of two dead children, Neil Layton, is trying to raise a social media petition to block the members bill going through Parliament to roll out the SEDA cars, up to now they have been trialled in secrecy.

Burton and Lamb not only have to establish the facts in the case, they need to juggle media and government level interference. And when they start examining safe places to cross the road, and it appears that a sleep deprived mother who has just returned to work was struggling to manage her 2 mobile children and a pram, things get very nasty indeed…

An absolute barnstormer of a thriller, I am totally in thrall to the talents of Abi Silver in creating such a moral minefield of a story , with such a shocking impact. I don’t normally ‘go for’ legal thrillers as the legalese can often leave me lost, but I found this was straightforward to follow.

The Cinderella Plan is the scheme by which the SEDA cars were to be sold to the public as a solution to human fault in car accidents-however, instead of being the glass slipper which gives us a happy ending, it turned back into a pumpkin when the clock struck midnight.

A very highly recommended legal thriller for readers who like morally ambiguous thrillers that make you think further than establishing whodunnit.  I am looking forward to following this up with ‘The Pinocchio Brief’

*During August, the lovely folk at Eye Books are giving readers 30% off with discount code RACHELREADIT*