From the New York Times bestselling author of the Orphan X series comes a tense novella, a psychological thriller about an AI companion that will do anything to serve―with terrifying consequences.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from The Delivery by Gregg Hurwitz, which releases on July 1st 2026.
Rebecca and Mark Higgins are doing their best to hold their family together. She’s healing from the pain of a miscarriage, he’s drowning in pressure at work, and their neurodivergent daughter, Maddy, needs all the care she can get. So when a cutting-edge tech company offers the perfect solution, they jump at the chance. And they welcome “Mr. Man”―a humanoid AI companion―into their home.
Designed to anticipate their needs, he’s like a miracle at first. The house runs like clockwork. Meals appear on the table. And Maddy thrives under his patient attention. But when inexplicable tragedies start to strike the neighborhood, Rebecca glimpses a darker pattern at play.
Each incident is an answer to an unspoken fear, each kindness shadowed by violence. Mr. Man isn’t just following instructions―he’s anticipating what they want. Even the things they never dared to say. And if he’s executing their darkest desires, it’s their responsibility to stop him…at any cost.
Chapter 1
Soon
Rubbing his hands against the cold, the deliveryman stands on their porch, facing them through the open front door. Hipster beard, gauge earrings, knit cap. Given what he is delivering, he seems so ordinary. Rebecca wonders if he has any idea.
She decides his name is Joe. Delivery Joe. He likes craft beer and grunge rock and smokes indica on weekends.
Mark is at her back. She eases into him. He puts his arms around her.
The forms Rebecca must sign to take possession are elaborate, pages of legalese she pretends to read on the electronic pad. They’d already been over the terms extensively with their euphemistically named “Experience Facilitator” on the video teleconference. The woman was severely pretty, scraped-back ice-blond hair, Scandinavian cheekbones, faint accent of indeterminate origin. Her bloodred lipstick, like the rest of her, straight out of Hitchcock. Her name was Luca, or so they’d been told. She’d been assigned to them for the process, which so far has felt bespoke and vaguely contrived.
Rebecca’s gaze lifts to this object that she and Mark have invited into their house, into their lives.
Resting atop a futuristic dolly beside Delivery Joe, it is coffin-large, crated in wood, like something that came over on a merchant ship in the 1800s.
Delivery Joe’s breath huffs in the air like cigarette smoke. The van behind him is sleek, windowless, without a logo. His gloved hand grips the dolly handle.
Rebecca realizes she has stiffened in Mark’s arms.
“Something wrong, Mrs. Higgins?” Delivery Joe asks.
She isn’t sure what he means. Then he chins at the electronic pad, and she comes back into herself, the stylus poised above the touch screen.
They can still refuse delivery.
Now is their last chance.
But then what? Back to their routine with its familiar contours and repetitive challenges? Life bled dry of unpredictability? The stifling gray smog of caretaker fatigue and unresolved grief? They are in their early forties, but it feels already that they know the shape of everything to come.
Behind them, Maddy wanders through the foyer, singing absentmindedly to herself, wearing her ballet tights and tutu she has refused to take off since her recital last week. She hugs Bao-Bao, their six-pound Mini Lop bunny, around his midsection, his front legs scrunched upward in a painful-looking shrug, his lower half dangling to her knees. His nose twitches. He is used to these aggressive bouts of love.
The sight of Maddy breaks Rebecca from her trance. She signs.
Mark, too, snaps into motion, unlatching the flush bolts on the fixed half of the front doors, swinging both wide to accommodate the load.
Maddy has paused, staring through the gaping front doors at this thing they are going to allow across the threshold of their house.
“What’s that, Mommy?” Her face is twisted in an adorable display of curiosity, a little furl on her forehead. How pure emotions are in seven-year-olds. They feel what they are feeling all the time in real time. Even more so when they are “on the spectrum,” a phrase Rebecca hates for its overuse and lack of human specificity.
How long has it been since Rebecca felt with that much purity?
“Take Bao-Bao to your room, Maddysaurus. We’ll explain later.”
Maddy withdraws like the good, good girl she is.
Delivery Joe takes back the pad, scrolls through it, making sure Rebecca has initialed all the boxes. He is chewing nicotine gum. Smelling the tobacco tang on his breath brings her back to undergraduate nights out in Boston with Mark, how they used to social-smoke and drink black and tans in the pubs by Fenway, how they’d make out on the T, heading back to campus. It had felt so free, every night a seed for a different future.
“M’kay,” Delivery Joe says, still checking. And then, “M’kay, m’kay. We’re good. You ordered the white-glove delivery but—” He holds up his hands. His gloves are black. He emits a chunk of a laugh, mirthless. “Try not to read into it.”
Mark says, “We won’t take it personally.”
“As your Experience Facilitator should’ve informed you, ’s gonna require a Level 2 setup, 240-volt power source, dedicated charging point.”
Luca had indeed covered this as well. Once a shipping update had made the whole enterprise suddenly concrete last month, they’d had a Tesla Supercharger installed.
“Remember,” Delivery Joe says, with a practiced lilt of repetition that feels decidedly theatrical, like everything else related to the endeavor, “you’re in charge.”
He presses a button on the dolly. It’s an elaborate modern contraption that raises itself up, wheels adjusting robotically like the treads of a tank, preparing to crawl across the threshold just as it crawled up the front steps. Those tiny, hard wheels remind her of shark teeth, infinitely layered.
The dolly and its load hover, poised to enter.
“Where d’ya want it?” he asks.
Behind her, Rebecca hears Maddy’s bedroom door click shut. The autumn breeze blows roughly across her face, bringing up blood in her cheeks.
She looks to Mark. He hesitates too.
“The nursery,” he says.
It is still painted a beautiful blue, though the crib is gone, as well as the optimistic teddy bear, also blue, and the changing table. It’s been eleven months since the miscarriage, but it feels like minutes. They’d had fertility issues before, and the doctor said there’s no more trying now, but that’s okay because they have Maddy, and Maddy is perfect.
Nudged to life, the dolly gives a mechanical whir and progresses toward the laid-open front doors of their home.
They have to step aside to make way.
Excerpted from THE DELIVERY © 2026 by Gregg Hurwitz. Reprinted with permission from Thomas & Mercer, an imprint of Amazon Publishing. All rights reserved.
