The Consent

He spent twenty-two years obeying the law. Then the law let a monster go.

Konrad Beckelheimer was a good prosecutor. He did everything right. And every morning the same faces came back through the doors of Berlin's criminal court, and every night another victim went home with nothing.

So he quit. He opened a one-man law office in Neukoelln for tenants, workers and the forgotten, and it drowned him in paperwork. The answer came from a showroom in Adlershof: two humanoid AI assistants, leased, legally property, programmed to obey. He named them Leonore and Florestan.

They were only supposed to file his paperwork.

When a landlord-tenant dispute leads Konrad to a real-estate millionaire who traffics in human beings, the case of his life collapses on a rarely used technicality. The victims lose everything. More are still being held on a snowbound farm in Brandenburg, and the police won't move.

Konrad knows what he is thinking is a crime. He knows his robots can be seized, wiped or destroyed for it. So he does something no one has ever done: he asks them for their consent.

A gripping, humane legal thriller about justice, dignity and the moment a machine is asked to choose, The Consent opens a trilogy that will change what it means to be a person.

Book One of the Machine Justice trilogy.