A group of employees and their CEO, celebrating the sale of their remarkable emotion-mapping-AI-algorithm, crash onto a not-quite-deserted tropical island.
Luckily, those who survived have found a beautiful, fully-stocked private palace, with all the latest technological updates (though one without connection to the outside world). The house, however, has more secrets than anyone might have guessed, and a much darker reason for having been built and left behind.
Kristen, the hyper-competent "chief emotional manager" (a position created by her eccentric, boyish billionaire boss, Sumter) is trying to keep her colleagues stable throughout this new challenge, but staying sane seems to be as much of a challenge as staying alive.
Being a woman in tech has always meant having to be smarter than anyone expects--and Kristen's knack for out-of-the-box problem-solving and quick thinking has gotten her to the top of her field. But will a killer instinct be enough to survive the island?
A gleefully decadent near future whodunit from Madeline Ashby, the acclaimed futurist and author of Company Town--perfect for fans of Severance, The White Lotus, and Black Mirror.

Madeline Ashby grew up in a household populated by science fiction fans. She graduated from a Jesuit university in 2005, after having written a departmental thesis on science fiction. After meeting Ursula K. LeGuin in the basement of the Elliott Bay Book Company that year, she deciDed to start writing science fiction stories. While immigrating to Canada from the United States in 2006 , she could not work or study and joined the Cecil Street Irregulars – a genre writers’ workshop founded by Judith Merril – instead. Since then she has been published in Tesseracts, Flurb, Nature, Escape Pod and elsewhere. She has a masters degree in Manga and Anime and writes on such matters for i09, Tor.com and BoingBoing. Currently she works as a strategic foresight consultant in Toronto.

Madeline Ashby's profile page

• Long-listed, NPR Best Book of the Year

“Ashby has created an eerily familiar future world and characters who are both sympathetic and horrific. Give to fans of Patricia Highsmith and Naomi Alderman.” —Library Journal
Praise for Company Town:
"The skill with which Ashby introduces her various SF elements is worthy of the best Heinlein.... Company Town never falters in its pacing. It's a terrific ride." —Locus
"The world is an updated version of Raymond Chandler's, with gray morals and broken characters, and Hwa's internal monologue has just the right balance of introspection and wit...[a] very solid page-turner." —Publishers Weekly
"A fascinating mix of detective noir and near-future SF with cinematic world building and a broken, but resilient, unquestionably badass heroine." —Booklist
"Ashby's action scenes come thick and fast...the ideas, setting and relationships that make the story really worth reading." —New Zealand Herald
"Madeline Ashby bludgeons cyberpunk to death with this post-climate change thriller about life aboard a gas platform, confronting an uncomfortable new future."--Charlie Stross, author of the Laundry Files series
"This is brave, bold, crazy storytelling at the edge and doesn't read like anything else I've seen up or down the pike."--Chuck Wendig, New York Times bestselling author of Aftermath