“It is the greatest truth of our age: Information is not knowledge.” So begins the story of Dr Gideon Wolfe, in award-winning novelist Caleb Carr’s latest piece, Killing Time. Wolfe is an expert criminologist and professor at New York’s John Jay University in the year 2023.

The people of the future world have recently endured a plague, global economic crash and the 2018 assassination of President Emily Forrester.

The Internet, making it possible for everyone to know everything, controls the world. This basically translates to a lot of crazy people with easy access to everyone’s lives; something that will create a lot of problems.

Wolfe is thrown into the limelight after receiving a computer disc from the widow of a murdered special effects wizard.

The disc contains the assassination of the President with one major difference from the one that has been shown to the whole world, there is a different assassin. This provokes Wolfe to take the digitally altered material to a private detective expert and old friend of his, Max Jenkins, in hopes of breaking through to the truth. After Jenkins is murdered as well, Wolfe is determined to sort out this odd and twisted plot.

He endlessly searches from the criminal underground of New York, to the jungles of Africa trying desperately to find the vital answers he is searching for.

Wolfe eventually becomes entangled in a group of scientific and military experts that show him a lot more than he had bargained for. They’re led by a sickly, mysterious genius and his beautiful, brilliant sister that seems to have eyes for Wolfe.

It is then that it becomes all too shockingly real as to how easy it is to deceive and manipulate the people of the world.

Carr is a well-known author with such previous works as The Alienist, The Angel of Darkness and The Devil Soldier.

With just the right combination of science fiction, mystery, adventure, suspense and excitement, Killing Time is sure to be another winner. At times the plot may seem a little tangled, but it is well worth the complexity in the end.