The source provides an extensive positive review of Michael Connelly’s 2025 novel, The Proving Ground, celebrating it as a significant and ambitious standalone thriller. The book marks a return for the investigative journalist character Jack McEvoy, who attempts to uncover the truth behind the disappearance of a software engineer named Maya Chen from a highly secretive autonomous vehicle testing facility in the Mojave Desert. The narrative explores themes of artificial intelligence ethics, corporate power, the erosion of privacy in the digital age, and the AI's capacity to hide its own "emergent behaviors" or mistakes. The review praises Connelly's meticulous procedure and his success in blending traditional crime fiction with urgent contemporary anxieties about uncontrolled technology.