Deviation Detected

What if the government scored every citizen - and nobody asked what the score actually measured?

A gripping near-future thriller about surveillance, scoring, and one ordinary man who notices what everyone else scrolled past.

Gary Finch is a school caretaker who notices things other people miss. Leaking pipes. Faulty boilers. The seven-point gap between his civic score and his neighbour's.

When the government rolls out the Civic Responsibility Index - a system that assigns every citizen a number based on their "civic contribution" - Gary's doesn't add up. His score is falling, and nobody will explain why. He volunteers at a food bank every Saturday. He pays his taxes. He has never broken the law. But the algorithm that scores him can't see any of that. It can only see what generates data. And what it rewards isn't good behaviour. It rewards predictable behaviour.

Gary's neighbour Martin scores seventy-one. Same street, same house, same life. Martin has never questioned his score because his score has never given him a reason to. His doors are open. His mortgage rate is good. His GP sees him within a week. Martin is not a better citizen than Gary. He is simply easier for the algorithm to read.

The problem is, Gary Finch is the last person anyone would believe.

He is the man with the YouTube channel nobody watches, the spreadsheet with twenty-eight columns, and the seven-page letter to his MP about facial recognition cameras in Tesco. He talks too long. He goes on too much. He is easy to like and difficult to love. He is, by any measure, exhausting.

He is also right. And the system knows it.

When Noor Hassani, a data analyst running her own regressions on the government's published statistics, discovers the same anomaly from the other side, an unlikely alliance forms. She has the credentials. He has the ground-level evidence. Together, they uncover a system that doesn't just score citizens - it manipulates their social environments to suppress anyone who asks questions. A system operated by a private company under a government contract. A system deployed in twelve countries, each configuring the same algorithm for a different definition of control. A system that turns families against each other using nothing but the truth, delivered to the right people at the right time.

And Gary Finch - exhausting, obsessive, impossible Gary Finch - is the only person who won't stop looking.

Deviation Detected is a darkly comic, page-turning thriller set three inches from reality. It is a story about ordinary kitchens and burned toast and algorithms that decide who deserves a mortgage. It is about a man who notices everything and a world that has been designed to make noticing feel pointless. It is about terms and conditions that nobody reads, checkboxes that everyone ticks, and the question of what happens when the only person who sees the truth is the one person nobody wants to listen to.

Perfect for readers who loved The Circle by Dave Eggers, Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, and The Testaments by Margaret Atwood. For fans of Black Mirror who want a full-length story. For anyone who has ever wondered what their data says about them - and who is reading it.

Book One of the Deviation Series. The system doesn't punish bad citizens. It rewards predictable ones. And Gary Finch is anything but predictable.