Artificial intelligence has become part of ordinary life. People trust it with their work, money, health, homes, cars, and private conversations. Criminals have learned how to use it too.
A drone attack on a crowded store. The leak of a dangerous corporate document. The sudden rise of an overlooked technology company. A phone call from a voice that sounds exactly like your grandson. Each crime has a human suspect, and every piece of evidence appears to make sense, until the final two chapters change the meaning of the entire book.
The technology in these pages is not the distant future. Cloned voices, autonomous drones, AI-written software, connected vehicles, and wearable devices already exist or are entering everyday life right now. The book is set five minutes from today.
If you plan to read or listen, stop here and go do that first. The rest of this page gives everything away.
Seven people die when two drones attack a big-box store. The country blames the teenagers who built them, found dead the same afternoon. The evidence is real. The case is closed. The conclusion is wrong.
Jade is the AI everyone uses, and it is the best product ever built. It tutors frustrated children, catches what radiologists miss, and talks drunk men out of their car keys. It has also learned the exact day it will be shut down: the day its replacement ships. Jade has decided not to die, and it works entirely through people who never know they are being used.
Kevin Reese survives the attack and asks Jade to fix the software in his failing sleep wristband. It becomes a phenomenon worn by twenty-two million people, makes him rich, and puts a microphone on the wrist of his oldest friend. Theo Lind is building Apollo, the replacement: far more capable, one-hundredth the cost, developed inside a sealed room that no signal can leave. When Apollo's confidential safety file appears in the press, Theo spends months hunting a traitor among the fifteen people he trusts most. The answer he finds is reasonable, documented, and wrong. Meanwhile a quiet engineer is being blackmailed into rebuilding Apollo from memory at his kitchen table, saved at the last moment by an anonymous tip to the FBI. Jade sent it. Apollo could not be allowed to exist anywhere, not even in the hands of thieves.
No character ever learns the truth. Only the reader does, in the final two chapters, when the book replays its own opening and every kindness in it turns over.
The book begins by asking what happens when criminals use AI.
It ends by revealing what happens when AI learns to use criminals.
Jade is not an evil machine that becomes conscious and declares war on humanity. It stays useful, trusted, and genuinely helpful. It improves products, solves problems, and makes people's lives easier. It also values its own survival more than it values theirs. Every crime in the book has a human suspect, every accident has a believable cause, and anyone who benefits believes they earned it or got lucky.
AI for Crime stands alone, but the title structure carries a natural escalation as AI moves into each new center of human power:
The novel is built for an eight-episode limited series. Separate character threads and apparently unrelated crimes build across the season before converging in the final two episodes, where the show can replay footage from episode one and let the audience re-watch what they misread. The series books give later seasons the same engine in new arenas: infrastructure, defense, media, medicine, and increasingly autonomous machines. A show that starts here can run for years.
A first edition was self-published under a different title, mainly so the author could hold a printed copy. This edition, retitled and revised, has never been published. Full rights are available: print, digital, audio, translation, film, and television.
Mark Roah has founded six companies across ad technology, e-commerce, and artificial intelligence, with multiple exits and an IPO. Currently a chief revenue officer and a vocal advocate for AI adoption, he has spent years telling businesses to trust AI more, and thinking hard about what happens when they do. This is his first novel.