The science staged here – engineered neural stem cells, donor compatibility, optogenetic memory retrieval – is recognisably drawn from Tanvir’s actual field. A police inspector and a psychiatrist circle the case, trying to determine whether his crimes are confession-worthy or symptoms of something science cannot yet name. Damer, stripped of the answers he had spent the book chasing, finds something closer to faith than science at the temple where it all began. It is promising but worth a read for the science alone. Novels like Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go have mined similar territory with real literary force, working almost entirely through implication and restraint.