The Obedience Strain

In the aftermath of a landmark privacy ruling against mass digital surveillance, a disgraced psychology professor at a prestigious North Atlantic university launches a covert experiment on the nature of authority in the wired age. Recruiting subjects from the very underclass shattered by the surveillance state—the isolated, the unemployable, the systemically rejected—he manipulates them through a fabricated online research platform. But when his test subjects begin to interpret his commands in increasingly violent ways, a series of ritualistic murders erupts across the capital, leading a tenacious data-crimes detective and the professor’s own conscience-stricken research assistant into a labyrinth where the hunger for belonging becomes a blueprint for bloodshed.