A CELEBRITY artist, who uses artificial intelligence to create shared dreams for her followers, is kidnapped by an organised crime group in All That We See Or Seem by Ken Liu (Head of Zeus, £9.99). Her desperate husband turns for help to Julia Z, who as a teenager became infamous as a hacker, and is now living a life below the digital radar in a Boston suburb.

Reluctantly, but energetically and with little regard for law and authority, Julia goes to war in an America where AI runs almost every aspect of life and your own data is employed against you every moment.

This near-future chase thriller — can they find the missing woman? Can they escape the wicked villain? — works perfectly well on that basis alone. But it’s made even more satisfying by an intelligent exploration of several themes concerning the human/machine interface. Particularly, it asks in the age of AI what is art, and what is an artist?

There’s more about the dangers of AI in Labyrinth by AG Riddle (Head of Zeus, £10.99), as a megalomaniac tech bro develops a virtual reality system which he is convinced will free humanity from unhappiness while also making him the richest man in the world. Our last hope of salvation lies in a group of strangers, brought together by a strange symptom of their tinnitus: they all hallucinate the same string of numbers at moments of stress.

I wasn’t absolutely convinced that the plot needed all 700 pages to unfold, but there’s no denying that the twists and mysteries keep coming all the way through. Time-bending, corporate conspiracies and nightmarish just-round-the-corner technology make for a lively adventure story.

Dr Henry Jekyll and his former fiancee, Muriel Carew, run a detective agency in Victorian London, in Jekyll & Hyde: Winter Retreat by Tim Major (Titan, £16.99), second in a series which is inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson and those who adapted him for stage and screen, but is shackled by neither. In Major’s version the third partner in the business, Edward Hyde, isn’t merely the bestial Id to Jekyll’s Ego. His position — as a prisoner of Jekyll, lacking existence itself except when the doctor chooses otherwise — naturally evokes sympathy, and that’s enhanced by this author’s subtle development of both men’s characters.

An odd-couple detective duo in which the two investigators can’t be present at the same time is an irresistible concept, and a locked-room murder puzzle at a country house in December perfectly fits the Jekyll & Hyde atmosphere of danger, deceit, and secret potions sipped or swigged.

Just as odd a couple feature in Adam Rose and Magenta King’s graphic novel, Huge Detective #1 (Titan, £2.30 kindle edition), in which cops Tamaki and Gyant investigate a series of killings. She’s human. And he’s a giant.

Don’t worry, it makes perfect sense in the book — especially if you have good memories of Jon Pertwee’s time as Doctor Who — and the fun is enormous.