Product Review

Cas Russell is back €" and so is her deadly supermath.

Cas may be an antisocial mercenary who uses her instant calculating skills to mow down enemies, but she€s trying hard to build up a handful of morals. So when she€s hired by an anguished father to rescue his kid from an evil tech conglomerate, it seems like the perfect job to use for ethics practice.

Then she finds her client€s daughter . . . who is a robot.

The researchers who own the €bot will stop at nothing to get it back, but the kid€s just real enough for Cas to want to protect her €" even though she knows she€s risking everything for a collection of metal and wires. But when the case blows up in her face, it plunges Cas into the crossfire of a massive, decades-long corporate espionage war.

Cas knows logically that she isn€t saving a child. She€s stealing a piece of technology, one expensive and high-stakes enough that spiriting it away is going to get innocent people killed. But she has a distraught father on one hand and a robot programmed to act like a distraught daughter on the other, and she€s never been able to sit by when a kid is in trouble €" even a fake one.

Screw morals and ethics. All Cas wants to do is save one little girl.