ROBERT HEALEY

There's a question I keep coming back to in my day job: what happens in the gap between a system that works exactly as designed and a system that's being exploited precisely because it works as designed?

I've spent my career in data privacy and AI governance, helping organisations build the guardrails meant to catch that kind of failure before it reaches real people. Writing fiction grew out of that work — a way to explore, in two connected series, the scenarios I think about professionally. There are no villains twirling moustaches here, just competent people, reasonable processes, and a genuine gap in oversight that nobody built maliciously and everybody has to live with the consequences of.

The Linnea Chen Novels

Bed 14 opens the series in a hospital where an AI triage system is doing exactly what it was designed to do — and that's precisely the problem.

Ghost Weight follows a fintech whose fraud-detection AI has spent months inventing customers instead of catching them.

The Weakest Link moves into EU financial regulation. A Malta-licensed payments platform built to serve gig workers has a trust signal that's been reverse-engineered by a cross-border fraud network — and the real tension isn't a courtroom scene, it's the fact that no single regulator, host state or home state, has full visibility into what's actually happening.

The Priyanka Desai Novels

The Priyanka Desai Novels grew out of the same world — Pri Desai starts out as Linnea's protégée at Chen Assurance, the London forensic-accounting firm Linnea built, and these three books follow her into partnership, and eventually into cases entirely her own.

Adverse Action opens with Pri newly made partner, called in on a Colorado mortgage platform whose automated underwriting engine has been quietly denying loans to the same neighbourhoods for the same reasons — dressed up as something else entirely, and outrunning a law that hasn't finished being written yet.

Adverse Impact finds her four months into the job, racing a New York hiring algorithm's ranking model before it auto-fires nine days' worth of offers and rejections onto a workforce it was never built to judge fairly — proof that catching the algorithm is the easy part; staying honest through what comes after is the real test.

Adverse Outcome, the latest release and the trilogy's close, follows Pri from a single insurer's "wellness score" into a data broker's categorisation engine licensed across fourteen companies and four industries — a case big enough that she opens her own Denver office and calls in reinforcements from London to finish it.

Where the Linnea Chen Novels ask what happens when a system works exactly as designed, the Priyanka Desai Novels ask a harder follow-up question: once you've proven the harm, what does it actually take — and cost — to unwind it.

If you work anywhere near AI governance, financial compliance, or cross-border regulation, you'll likely recognise the shape of these problems immediately. Each case — across both series — is built to be technically accurate to the real frameworks behind it, from EMD2 passporting and MFSA supervisory practice to US algorithmic lending and hiring law, rather than invented, plausible-sounding nonsense.