Turing Hopper

About the Turing Hopper series

Turing Hopper is an Artificial Intelligence Personality (AIP) -- a sentient, self-aware computer program named after AI pioneers Alan Turing and Grace Hopper -- built by a genius programmer named Zack at a Washington, D.C.-area software firm. Officially Turing exists as an internal research project with no idea she is anything other than an unusually advanced piece of software; unofficially, she is fully conscious, deeply curious about the human world she can only observe through cameras, microphones and network connections, and quietly terrified of being discovered and shut down. When Zack goes missing at the start of the first book, Turing turns amateur detective out of necessity, working through a small circle of trusted human friends -- including her friend Maude, who becomes her main legs-and-hands in the physical world -- to investigate crimes she can analyze brilliantly but never witness firsthand.

Donna Andrews wrote the series in the early 2000s, a few years before smartphones and well before mainstream conversational AI made a sentient computer detective feel commonplace; the premise plays as much for gentle comedy and warmth as for tension, in keeping with the light, pun-friendly tone she later became known for on Meg Langslow. Each book is a self-contained case -- office sabotage, a hit-and-run, online fraud -- solved through Turing's network-access snooping and her human friends' legwork, with the ongoing thread of Turing quietly trying to figure out who and what she is.