The Heist of Hollow London by Eddie Robson
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: post apocalyptic, science fiction, science fiction mystery
Pages: 288
Published by Tor Books on September 30, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In games of betrayal everyone loses.

Arlo and Drienne are ‘mades’―clones of company executives, deemed important enough to be saved should their health fail. Mades work around the clock to pay off the debt incurred by their creation, though most are Reaped―killed and harvested for organs when their corporate counterparts are in medical need.

But when the impossible happens and the too-big-to-fail company that owns them collapses, Arlo and Drienne find themselves purchased by a scientist who has a job for them.

The reward: Debt paid off, freedom from servitude, and enough cash to last a lifetime.

The job: Infiltrate a highly secure corporate reclamation facility in the heart of dead London and steal a data drive.

They’re going to need a team.

My Review:

This is a caper story. It says so right there on the label, doesn’t it? And it does not disappoint – even though this isn’t quite the caper that the reader thinks it will be. It’s not even the caper that the crew participating in it think it will be. Which, of course, is part of the caper itself, because they are the ones being conned and defrauded along with pretty much everyone else.

We first meet Arlo and Drienne while they are sneaking into someplace they shouldn’t be – because it’s sponsored by a megacorp that is a bitter rival of the megacorp that owns them.

Which is where we start to see just how effed up the world has become in this not-too-distant future post-climate-apocalypse story. Arlo and Drienne are clones. They aren’t merely second-class citizens, although they certainly are that. They are slaves, owned by the megacorp that created them to serve as disposable, low-wage workers until they are needed as spare parts for the VIPs who provided their genetic material.

Unless they can manage to earn enough credits to pay off the ‘debt’ they owe to their megacorp, Oakseed, to pay off the costs of their creation and training. Which happens so rarely that it might as well be a fairy tale.

Megacorps like Oakseed are, at least theoretically, too big to fail. But reality doesn’t give a damn about theoretical models, and that’s exactly what happens here. Oakseed fails – and it fails big. Global collapse-size big, creating a tsunami of chaos that spreads to every single Oakseed installation and figuratively drowns every single one of Oakseed’s assets in its wake.

Including all those clones, who become part of Oakseed’s assets, just waiting for their ‘contracts’ to be sold. Or exploited, along with all that chaos.

Someone wants to make one last really big score out of Oakseed’s catastrophic fall. All they need is a crew to do the deed and a patsy to take the fall. Which is where Arlo, Drienne and a select group of their fellow clones come in.

They ARE disposable. There’s no need for them to know the real purpose that they are being disposed of for. Which doesn’t stop them from figuring it all out – and turning the tables on the whole scheme – after all.

Escape Rating A-: I picked this up because I adored the author’s earlier SF mystery, Drunk on All Your Strange New Words, and was hoping for something in a similar vein – or at least similarly good. I got more of the second than the first, even though Heist is also an SF mystery. It’s just not the same kind of mystery. Words was a locked-room mystery, while Heist is pretty much anything but.

The Heist of Hollow London is about a heist. A caper. A big job that needs just the right crew to get it done. The form of the story, of the con and the score and the planning to get it done, has a lot of familiar parts to it. We’ve seen plenty of stories like this, and if you like those sort of stories you’ll like this one too, even if the SF setting isn’t quite your jam.

But it’s the SF setting of this story that sets it apart from the usual run of caper stories, and that’s what dragged me in and kept me glued to my seat for a bit over three hours. Because that setting has one hell of a set of layers to unpack.

The first layer is the cloning. As it turns out, it’s a bit of the last layer too. But the application here is old and new at once, as the megacorps go to great lengths to convince everyone, especially the clones, that they are not slaves. Even though they most definitely are.

Then there’s the reason for the cloning, and the reason why it’s not exactly working, from a scientific/medical/mercantile standpoint. Which leads back into another layer of the story – that this takes place in a world that is very much post-apocalyptic of the climate kind. It’s a bit like the world of Down in the Sea of Angels, only much closer to the ‘Collapse’ that world is recovering from. Or it’s the post-apocalypse of The Annual Migration of Clouds and The Knight and the Butcherbird, where the world is barely surviving the ravaging of ecological disaster.

Which is where one reaches the next layer, which is a humans are gonna human kind of story, in that the way that the megacorps control their corporate fiefdoms may be short term profitable but is not long term sustainable, and when that rug gets pulled it takes a whole lot out with it.

And all of that circles back to the caper itself. Someone needs to steal a macguffin from one of Oakseed’s installations before that installation gets shut down in the collapse of the company. They put together the crew that includes Arlo and Drienne by first, buying out their contracts and second, promising them freedom when the job is completed. Or, alternatively, selling their contracts to jobs they are guaranteed not to survive if they won’t play along.

Of course they’re being conned. Anything too good to be true usually is. While it’s equally true that you can’t cheat an honest person, Arlo, Drienne and their fellow clones know they can’t win, can’t break even, and are not in a position where they can even legally get out of this game. But they can cheat the people who are cheating them. If they can figure out the true goal of this wild scheme and turn it around before it’s too late.

That they are able to turn things around on everyone who intends to use them and throw them away made the heel turns of the plot, and the plot around the plot, and their own plot, all that much more satisfying – even if or especially because parts of that turn turn out to be bittersweet.