Mona is the creator of an AI designed to write poetry, and her company is acquired by venture capitalist Avram Parr, who has an intriguing portfolio. After the purchase, Mona retreats into seclusion (I too would like to throw my phone into the river), but she's drawn back when Parr dies under suspicious circumstances.

The book quickly evolved into an engaging thriller, taking unexpected turns in both its plot direction and the business sector it explored. Despite the AI elements mentioned in the plot description, this is definitely a human story.

Despite her sarcasm and dry wit, Mona was an enjoyable point-of-view character. Her musings on the depth and importance of language and poetry were fascinating, especially when another character later explored these themes from a very different perspective. She might have inspired me to start reading poetry!

The Hildegard AI’s occasional poems between book chapters were an interesting addition and quite unsettling.

There was a diverse cast of characters that kept me guessing about their motives. Although he played a minor role, I grew quite fond of Mona's neighbor Del. Parr and the detective were also particularly interesting and well-developed characters.

Some readers may find some of the procedures described upsetting, but we the reader are not “present” for them.

Thank you to Skyhorse Publishing for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

In the cerebral literary thriller Stop All the Clocks, Mona Veigh is a brilliant technologist and poetry scholar who created an AI program, named Hildegard, that she has trained to recognize and write poetry. After the mysterious death of her colleague Avram Parr, whose company acquired Hildegard, Mona has renounced technology and isolated herself on Roosevelt Island. When Mona starts to suspect there might be more to Parr’s death than meets the eye, she reenters society and embarks on a quest to discover the truth.

The book deftly explores the very real tension between humanity and technology. Various characters in the book represent these two forces, with Mona in the middle struggling to make sense of the impact of her creation in a world of techno villains and disruptors.

As Mona gets more deeply enmeshed in the Parr mystery, she revisits favorite poems as sources of comfort. These contrast with Hildegard’s cold and eerie poetry output that appears throughout the book. Poetry and language play a strong role in Mona’s internal conflict between what is truly real and what is just pattern recognition and code.

The narrative shifts between a page-turning mystery and abstract philosophical musings on poetry, language, technology, and humanity. It’s a thought provoking and original story, but at times dense and difficult to interpret, so it didn’t always land for me.