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A few weeks ago I read the novel Gridiron by Philip Kerr. It’s a science fiction story about a hi-tech building that starts killing all people inside the building. Sounds pretty corny? Well, this book is a lot, but it’s not corny ! I actually really enjoyed this book.

A team of architects have developed a smart hi-tech building (Gridiron) for a company. The building does literally everything itself: it cleans the toilets, uses holograms, controls the elevators, etc… The control system of Gridiron’s called Abraham.

The software developers programmed a replicate ability in the control system Abraham. And that was a mistake. Already before the office is officialy openend Abraham starts creating his ’son’ named Isaac. The software developers decide to ‘kill’ Isaac and they restart Abraham. But immediatly when they ‘kill’ Isaac, the adventure inside the building starts. And people get killed. Soon the people inside the building find out that it isn’t funny when a hi-tech building becomes self-aware. Gridiron comes up with really sick ways to kill as many people as possible…

The people inside the building are architects, policemen, software developers and security guards. Yeah, these people are a lot, but they aren’t friends. Locked up inside a psycho maniac killer building and getting mad at each other all the time; that really sucks.

Check, the cover of the dutch translated Gridiron paperback. ‘Het Gebouw’ means ‘The Building’.