 Every now and then my brain decides to remind me of the Catherine Bigelow sci-fi thriller movie Strange Days. It's one of those movies that pops back into the mind easily thanks to some great direction and cinematography, the concept that you can download and relive people's memories and best of all it features Skunk and Nancy, one of the best British rock bands of the 90s, but I digress. Algorithm of the Gods deals with a fairly similar concept where you can have other people's experiences pumped into your brain for a price of course. Only there are sinister forces in the background of the operation and it's up to a PI and an insider to solve a missing person's case and uncover the truth. Again, kind of like Strange Days this uses the technological side of things as the frame on which to hang a more traditional gumshoe noirish kind of detective story and it makes for an interesting spin on that standard kind of format while sharing a lot of the scenes and setups. Fans of that genre may be familiar with some of the more science fiction elements lost me at times but the story clunks along at a decent enough pace so it never gets too bogged down in jargon and whatnot. What didn't work for me so much was the flicking between different perspectives as this happens out of linear time. Even just having something like a two weeks earlier might have helped but often you're being flashed back without warning and this made the story hard to follow at times. Once you realise that you're in the past, those sections flesh out the main plot quite well, adding layers to the evil and giving more attention to the bad guys than the heroes but it wasn't fully sold on the delivery method. Can't say that I was super interested in the lead characters either. Spencer, the gumshoe character is pretty Biden numbers and the insider that he teams up with has a few decent moments but they're mostly away from Spencer. Their mutually beneficial partnership doesn't run in a romantic direction which is a welcome change on a lot of these stories but nor does their relationship sparkle. Not that I was expecting buddy comedy levels of banter or anything but they're mostly just along for the ride with one another and apart from sharing information there's a team up that only rarely skirts close to danger so there should be time to get to know them better only there isn't so I had a hard time building up a sense of who they were to the point where I was reading more to see what happened next rather than being super concerned about the characters fate. Things also wrap up pretty fast and in an open-ended manner suggesting that there are more stories in this world on the way. Fleshing out the release are extracts from SC Mendez's excellent journey into the weird underworld of the city and Nicky Noir's first story in the Black Planet series. Now admittedly I'll stop short of reading that because I'm going to do a separate review on that along with some of Nicky Noir's other books but if you've read Watches of the Black Right this serves as a lead-in to that book so you might want to check that out as a bit of a bonus after the main feature and as for that main feature it's it's all in all an okay read nothing to set the world on fire maybe but a decent enough trip through modern concepts online influencers and the dark side of fame along with some explorations of identity and consciousness that might be a bit too familiar for sci-fi fans to get excited about but still a decent enough read.