2001 Past Reviews:
 Reviewed in January, 2001
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Ground Zero,
by Bonnie Ramthun
Paperback, Berkley, 1999, 341 pages, $6.99
Terry Guzman, a Department of Defense war game programmer, is found dead in a locked room, a sharpened screwdriver protruding from her back. Everyone has reasons for wishing Terry dead. An indifferent programmer, she has been blackmailing fellow gamers to clean up her code, and a string of other dead bodies hint at her participation in a spy ring that stretches from the Rockies to Uzbekistan. Colorado Springs cop Eileen Reed teams up with CIA analyst Lucy Giometti to solve the locked room mystery without revealing the country's highest secrets.
First-time novelist Ramthun was a Defense war gamer herself and she got the details just right: the tension, anticipation, camaraderie, even the donuts. The how-dunnit facet of the plot is quickly solved, and a knowledge of computers help you outguess the detective. The who-dunnit has a computer solution as well. Two strong women protaganists are rare in a computer/military mystery but Ramthun pulls it off with elegance. Her second book, Earthquake games, has just been released in hardback.
Reviewed in January, 2001
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The Prometheus Deception,
by Robert Ludlum
Hardback, St. Martin's Press, 2000, 509 pages, $27.95
Retired spy Nick Bryson is plucked out of his quiet life of a college professor in a West Virginia backwater to save the world. The CIA tells him that the Directorate, the super-secret agency that employed him, was really a GRU front and everything his knows about his family, his failed marriage and his career is an elaborately contrived lie. Bryson is stabbed and shot, poisoned and pestered, bopped on the head and betrayed by those he trusts as he infiltrates the highest echelons of power to uncover the truth.
If you're looking for a computer crime, hang with this one. Computers aren't mentioned until way past page 200, and don't take over the scene for another hundred pages past that. It's worth the wait. Without giving away too much of the zig-zagging plot, the key issue is the ever-present tension between privacy and security. Technology has made it possible to collect masses of information on individuals and organizations. It is worthwhile to give governments access to your medical and credit records if doing so could stop a terrorist act? Lots of geeky details. Ludlum has been writing thrillers for thirty years and has lost none of his power. Recommended.
Reviewed in February, 2001
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Gray Matter,
by Shirley Kennett
Paperback, Pinnacle Books, 1997, 307 pages, $5.99
In her inaugural mystery, psychologist PJ Gray moves to St. Louis to set up a new Computer Homicide Investigations Project, or CHIP. Before she even finds a place to live, she's confronted with her first case. A musician and a ballet dancer are killed under bizarre circumstances, a perfect test for the validity of her virtual reality modeling crime-solving technique. Her reconstruction of the crimes provide the details needed to catch the killer, grizzly misfit who believes that by eating the brains of his talented victims he will ingest their genius.
I read the two later books in this series, Fire Cracker and Chameleon, before I got to the debut novel. I'm still intrigued by using virtual reality for solving crimes. The details are engrossing, right down to the jury-rigged headgear that bears a striking resemblance to a spaghetti strainer. The crime details are gruesome and not for the faint of heart. Recommended. Be smarter than I was and read them in order.
Reviewed in February, 2001
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The Victim in Victoria Station,
by Jeanne M. Dams
Paperback, Worldwide Library, 2000, 253 pages, $5.99
Senior sleuth Dorothy Martin chats with a young American on a train but when she stops by his seat to say goodbye, he is dead. In a rush, she leaves him in the care of a man claiming to be a physician. Later, no one, but no one, acknowledges that a body was found at Victoria Station. Snooping around, she identifies him as a young software millionaire, inventor of groundbreaking search engine, in England to check on some irregularities in his London operation. Suspecting foul play, she has a young friend teach her the rudiments of word processing so she can get a job as a temporary receptionist at the dead man's office. She soon figures out that the problem is piracy, but who is in on the plot to black-market the company's software?
Dorothy is a gutsy protagonist and older readers, especially, will applaud her intrepid leap into a brave new world of computers. Young Nigel gives a brilliantly simple explanation of office applications. "Why didn't anyone tell me about this before?," Dorothy complains. The piracy plot is well done; naïve me never speculated that employees would stoop to selling their company's product on the side and keeping the cash. A nice, cozy mystery with believable computer details.
Reviewed in March, 2001
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The Beryllium Murder,
by Camille Minichino
Hardback, William Morrow & Co, 2000, $24.00, 262 pages
Gloria Lamerino, a retired Berkeley physicist, hotfoots back to the West Coast to visit old friends and snoop into the death of a former colleague. Although beryllium guru Gary Larkin's death is marked down as accidental, Gloria suspects that the scientist is too cautious to inhale a lungful of the deadly dust. Her doubts harden when a teenager who wrote a school paper about beryllium disappears. Rebuffed by the police yet determined to see justice served, she barrels into the midst of the investigation to capture a crafty killer with a venal motive and ingenious method.
How timely! Express-News subscribers have no doubt been following Roddy Stinson's expose of the mystery surrounding Kelly Air Force Base's sinister beryllium room. If not, you can catch up online. Minichino is working her way through the periodic table of the elements (she should live so long to get to Lawrencium) and beryllium, as good chemistry students will remember, is number four. The scientific details are abundant, precise and jargon-free. The computer tie-in, without giving away too much of the plot, involves computer hacking. You'll get more out of this book if you work your way through hydrogen, helium and lithium first - and stay tuned for boron! I got my copy from the Cody branch library.
Reviewed in March, 2001
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Lucy Crocker 2.0: a Novel,
by Caroline Preston
Hardcover, Scribner, 2000, $23.00, 352 pages
 Life is pretty good for Lucy Crocker, but after she suffers a string of miscarriages her husband distracts her by prodding her to design a computer game. Maiden's Quest becomes a bestseller and her life falls apart. The cosy software house that her husband founded becomes a heartless corporation, he starts sneaking off to hotel rooms for tantric massages with his PR director and her twin sons spend their days ogling Internet porn. Control of the Maiden's Quest sequel is wrested away from her and the dreamy heroine is transformed into a busty gun-toting bleached blonde. Enough! A dispirited Lucy escapes to a family cabin in the Wisconsin north woods to reinvent herself and her dysfunctional family.
I confess: this is neither mystery nor thriller, but the computer details are so rich that I couldn't pass it up. The marketing details were especially compelling. Even though Maiden's Quest I was the best-selling game ever, surveys indicate that most games are bought by teenaged boys who lust after sex and violence so let's pander to the lowest common denominator in the sequel. This type of thinking gets my dander up and the novel captures the tyranny of focus groups perfectly. Lucy Crocker was a book-of-the-month club selection and highly recommended for those who favor Oprah-type books with a high-tech twist.
Reviewed in April, 2001
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Eyeball Wars: A Novel of Dot-Com Intrigue,
by David Meerman Scott
Hardback, 2001, Freshspot Publishing, $24.00, 351 pages.
Richard Williams, the playboy slacker son of an overbearing media mogul, is exiled to California to run the family's fledgling Web site. Just as Richard starts grasping the potential of the Internet, his father withdraws his backing and sets up his wayward son for dismal failure or self-made success. As the last of the money trickles away, Richard has to grow up or give up.
By page twenty I was convinced that if I had to spend one more minute with Richard Williams I would puke. By page 100 I was rooting for him to succeed. Trust me, Richard and his buddies grow on you. Not strictly a mystery, but plenty of intrigue. This book takes a thoughtful stance on the tension between the old media and the new, with insightful and funny commentary on what the Web must deliver if it is to succeed commercially. I loved the experimental Japanese toilet that analyzes body wastes and instantly transmits the results to your physician over a secure Web connection. The scene where Richard and his buddy rush to hook up a presentation in an unfamiliar conference room is sure to resonate with the slideshow crowd. Great insight on the inner working of venture capital. A must-read for anyone involved in e-commerce. It made me laugh and made me rethink the design and purpose of several of my Web sites. An unbeatable combination. Visit the web site for two sample chapters.
Reviewed in April, 2001
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The Man of Maybe Half-A-Dozen Faces,
by Ray Vukcevich
Hardback, 2000, St. Martin's Minotaur, $22.95, 245 pages
Prudence hires Skylight Howells, private eye, to find her brother, Pablo, who is hiding in virtual reality, a suspect in the death of his business partner. Prudence gets more than she bargained for. Skylight has multiple personality disorder and his agency is staffed by alter-egos: Lulu, Dieter, Scarface, Dennis, the Average Guy . . . a whole cast of loonies. Someone with a powerful grudge is bumping off bad technical writers, like the guy who wrote a software manual and forgot to explain how to quit the program. Skylight must find the killer before more bad writers end up in the recycle bin of life.
I've been tempted to throttle the authors of some of the manuals I use, so the premise was totally believable to me. It covers the gamut of computer topics, from anonymous remailers, to virtual reality, online hypertext help files and mailing lists. Vukcevich is a computer programmer in the brain development lab at the University of Oregon and has the technical detail down cold. This is a tightly crafted book that sucks you into a frenzied world of bizarre characters and spits you out delighted, exhausted and wanting more. It's a challenging read that required considerable concentration to keep the surreal characters and complex plot straight. Can't wait for the sequel.
Reviewed in May, 2001
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The Killing Maze,
by David Cole
Paperback, Avon, 2001, $6.50, 325 pages
Since we first met Laura in Butterfly Lost she's changed her name, settled in Tuscon and gone to work for an aging - and missing - private eye. Laura reluctantly leaves the anonymity of her computer keyboard for a face-to-face meeting with a pharmacist who suspects prescription drug insurance fraud at her small chain of drug stores The deeper Laura digs, the more complex the crimes. Gangs. Smuggling Native American babies across the Mexican border for illegal adoptions. Ruthless right-wing politics. Teamed up with Rey, an ex border agent and his ex-wife Meg, a performance artist, Laura risks her carefully constructed false identity and life itself to untangle a labyrinth of deception and death.
Even better than Butterfly Lost, which I loved. Laura shows her usual facility in cracking into corporate databases and uncovers an Internet scam of stunning evil and astounding complexity. A tight plot, excellent secondary characters and a theme as fresh as today's newspaper. Don't miss this one. Will especially appeal to Tony Hillerman fans and those who enjoy a richly constructed Southwestern plot.
Reviewed in May, 2001
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Help Me Please,
by Barbara D'Amato
Paperback, 1999, Forge Suspense, $6.99, 344 pages
Three-year-Old Danielle Gaston is snatched from her prominent parents during a mass at Holy Name Cathedral. Ninety minutes later, Danielle is the star of her own Web site: starkly public yet deeply hidden. It's up to Chicago cop Polly Kelly to find her, but at every turn the clever kidnappers foil her. Pitted against the FBI, which is convinced that its high-tech expertise will crack the case, Polly uses traditional, foot-slogging police work to find Danielle before the abandoned toddler starves to death.
A compelling, evil plot with a shocking surprise at the end. The technical details of trying to track down a rogue Internet connection are right on target. If you've ever wondered about dark fiber, or the inner workings of an anonymous remailer, the explanations here will make it clear. D'Amato is a superb writer, creating believable characters and suspenseful plots. She has a great sense of place: Chicago comes alive on these pages. Highly recommended.
Reviewed in June, 2001
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The Devil Went Down to Austin,
by Rick Riordan
Hardback, Bantam Doubleday Dell, June 2001, 336 pages, $23.95
UTSA professor and part-time investigator Tres Navarre is preparing for a summer gig teaching English lit at UT-Austin when he learns that his older brother put up the family ranch as collateral for a software startup. Someone sabotaged Garrett's innovative security program during beta testing to force a cheap sale. A partner is murdered and Garret is in the frame for the hit. Tres has to tie up the loose ends to save his brother and the ranch.
San Antonio's own Rick Riordan, winner of the Edgar, Anthony, and Shamus awards, will be at Remember the Alibi Mystery Bookstore on June 16 at 2 p.m. to sign his new book. This is the fourth entry in the hip, literate and fast-paced Tres Navarre series but the first one with a high-tech theme. The plot revolves around a back door in the software that gave the saboteurs a way in to toy with the sensitive files of the companies involved in the beta test. Even though it's set in Austin there are enough San Antonio references to sustain our local pride. After you read this one you won't rest easy until you catch up with the rest of the series.
Reviewed in June, 2001
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The Blue Nowhere,
by Jeffery Wilds Deaver
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster, May 2001, 432 pages, $26.00
Access, which started out as a harmless computer game, turned so nasty that no server in the world would host it. Wyatt Gillette dropped out of the game when it turned bad but eventually ended up in jail on a minor hacking charge. Phate just couldn't let go. He carried the virtual game into the real world, racking up points by killing people who were progressively harder to get access to. He wrote a tunneling program that burrowed into people's computers, used the personal information he gleaned to finagle plausible meetings with them, and then killed them. The cops spring Gillette from prison to help catch the killer and the two former colleagues go keyboard to keyboard in a deadly race.
Soon after I read the book I went to a meeting and was able to hold my own with a gaggle of scientists in a conversation about virtual supercomputers, based solely on bits I gleaned from The Blue Nowhere. I used what I learned about social engineering in a talk I gave to a group about computer security. Complex concepts are explained simply and without condescension by having the "good" hacker translate them using clear metaphors to the computer-illiterate homicide cop. When I wrote my first computer crime review this is exactly the kind of book I envisioned reading every month. Lots of action, plenty of technology and just enough left unresolved at the end to hold out hope for a sequel.. Joel Silver (The Matrix, Lethal Weapon, Die Hard) will produce the film for Warner Brothers.
Reviewed in July, 2001
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Murder in Central Park: A Bill Donovan Mystery,
by Michael Jahn
Paperback, Worldwide Mystery, May 2001, $5.99, 272pp.
N.Y.P.D. Captain Bill Donovan takes a break from crime fighting to camp out with a scientist friend in a Central Park tree house observing the behavior of crows. When he descends at dawn it's only to find a venerable old bird pecking at a corpse. The body belongs to a stalker who had sent hundreds of e-mails to a teenaged cyber-grrrl who practiced "body art" with a camera running 24-hours a day in her bedroom. Suspects abound, from Donovan's friend, to a rival scientist studying the park's rats, the girl's boyfriend and a gang of inline skaters.
I can't believe that this author escaped my notice; I immediately scarfed up all the books I could find in this engaging series. Donovan and his sidekick, Sergeant Moskowicz, are the two most technologically advanced detectives in Manhattan. Even when he's disguised as a homeless person, Donovan checks his e-mail via laptop and cell phone. The high-tech clincher in this entry is a peek into the world of 24-hour web cams. There's also a clever episode that involves tinkering with the time stamp on a video camera. This book just slips under the radar as a computer crime, but it's a great read with a nifty plot.
Reviewed in August, 2001
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The Street,
by Lee Gruenfeld
Hardback, Doubleday, 2001, $23.95, 399 pages
Stockbroker James Vincent Hanley is having jealous snits putting together Internet startup deals that make zillionaires out of pimply-faced geeks while he struggles to make ends meet on a mere $300K a year. When he quits his job to start his own dot-com, Security and Exchange Commission agent Jubal Thurgren smells a rat. The hot new company has no clear mission and no product yet has managed to attract millions and millions in venture capital. As Artimis.com is poised to go public, Thurgren struggles to make sense out of the new economy to determine whether Hanley's brainchild is a groundbreaking innovation or a brilliant rip-off.
I went to a university founded by repentant stock market manipulator Daniel Drew who scammed the market by selling watered stock, cattle that had been starved, led to the salt-block and bloated with water to boost their selling weight. This legacy left me with a finely tuned appreciation for the well-crafted swindle. If you've ever been tempted to cash in the kid's college fund and invest the proceeds in the next best thing, read his book first. It goes a long way towards explaining the recent dot-com meltdown and how six-month-old, debt-ridden high-tech companies are generating fortunes for their young founders. The writing is excellent, the characters well drawn and the insight you'll get into Wall Street worth its weight in gold.
Reviewed in August, 2001
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Burn Factor,
by Kyle Mills
Hardback, Harper Collins, 2001, 384 pages, $25.00
Young computer programmer Quinn Barry takes a low-level job at the FBI in hopes of worming her way into an agent assignment. A false positive match on an old DNA database that she is tweaking frustrates her. When she keeps niggling at what she considers a minor coding error she is banished to the boonies. Her reputation and professional pride on the line, Quinn sticks her nose into the middle of a high-level cover-up involving a serial killer and a secret revival of the star wars missile defense system.
All the best computer stuff is in the beginning of the book, when Quinn pulls an all-nighter and triumphantly ferrets out a few lines of hidden code that cause the search engine to reject a particular DNA sequence. The picture of a smart programmer worrying the code like a dog with a bone is a sweet one and challenges our naïve faith in the integrity of data. Mills is a competent young thriller writer with a substantial following; I find his characters a bit thin and his plots improbable, but there's plenty of action to keep you turning the pages.
Reviewed in September, 2001
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Angels and Demons, by Dan Brown
Hardcover, Pocket Books, May, 2000, 480 pages, $24.95
The secret brotherhood known as the Illuminati has resurfaced, brutally murdering a physicist in Switzerland and burning him with one of their long-lost brands. Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is called to the scene to retrace the steps of the four hundred-year-old society through the streets, crypts and churches of Rome before they destroy the Vatican City and disrupt the conclave of cardinals convened to elect the next Pope.
Maybe I'm stretching the Computer Crimes theme a bit here, but the first several chapters do take place at the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, also known as CERN, birthplace of the Internet. And the central theme, the tension between science and religion, should be of interest to geeks of all persuasions. This is a terrifically engaging book - I stayed up until four in the morning to finish it. The final fifty pages had more plot shifts than a graveyard in an earthquake. It was released in paperback in June and is available for download as an e-book. Highly Recommended!
Reviewed in September, 2001
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Booked for Murder,
by Val McDermid
Paperback, Spinsters Ink, 2000, 260 pages, $12.00
Lindsay Gordon, by her own assessment a `cynical socialist lesbian feminist journalist', flies to London to rescue a friend who is the prime suspect in the murder of a former lover. Penny, a successful children's book author, was turning her hand to her first adult novel and was killed by an exploding beer bottle, a method lifted straight from her book. Meanwhile, another friend turns to Lindsay for help to unmask coworkers who are jeopardizing her video company by producing porno flicks.
During the course of her adventure, Lindsay relies on Penny's admirably compulsive backup discipline to track down a floppy disk of the missing novel, breaks into a computer system to coax back incompletely deleted files and plants several cleverly backdated incriminating documents. Linday's hard-earned computer skills are showcased but the deft plot and camaraderie among the characters are the stars of the show. Scottish writer McDermid is just starting to develop an American following and this engaging book is a good starting place.
Reviewed in September, 2001
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Murder.Com: The Dark Side of the Net,
by Sarah St. Peter
Paperback, Dageforde Publishing, 1999, 250 p, $7.99
Successful software saleswoman Elizabeth Strong emerged from an abusive childhood with her psyche held together by bailing wire and duct tape. Her fragile sanity crumbles when her father, a recent Alcoholics Anonymous convert, reappears and asks for forgiveness. She gives him an old computer and gets him onto the Internet so they can keep in touch, then mails him a disk elaborately rigged to release a deadly puff of deadly botulism bacteria when the disk is inserted into the drive.
In real life the author is a stand-up comedian but don't expect a funny book - this is a dark novel about the disintegration of a personality. The explanation of rigging the disk with botulism is almost too real, written with more clarity than most computer manuals. If I hated you, I now know enough to kill you this way. The title is misleading - there is nothing .Com about it, except Elizabeth's use of the anonymity of the Internet to buy botulism. Recommended, but be prepared to be depressed at the end.
Reviewed in September, 2001
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Murder in Belleville,
by Cara Black
Hardcover, Soho Press, October 2000, 368p, $23.00
Parisian detective Aimeé LeDuc is back, this time in the Belleville Quartier, the old stomping ground of Edith Piaf and now an appealing melánge of immigrants and yuppies. An old friend pressures Aimeé into helping her with a philandering spouse and she appears just in time to see the husband's mistress blown up by a car bomb. Aimeé and her business partner, the handsome dwarf hacker Rene, use all of their gumshoe and computer skills to link the explosion to a standoff between the government and sans-papiers, illegal African immigrants threatened with imminent return to their countries of birth.
Aimeé and Rene and into French Bank records to uncover the mistress's true identity and follow the cyber trail of money in a high level scam that disguises weapons deals as humanitarian aid. Aimeé uses photo enhancement software to reconstruct shredded documents culled from the garbage and Rene gives a plug for Corel Knockout as a tool for doctoring identity photos. As with Black's first novel, Murder in the Marais, the real star of this book is the city of Paris. I found the plot a little hard to follow but well worth the trouble. The background on France's continual struggle with the sad legacy of Algeria was fascinating. Highly recommended!
Reviewed in October, 2001
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Under the Color of Law,
by Michael McGarrity
Hardcover, Penguin-USA, 2001, 272 p., $23.95
In his sixth appearance, Kevin Kerney, just installed as the Santa Fe police chief, is confronted with the murders of the estranged wife of a U.S. ambassador and a retired Maryknoll priest dedicated to shutting down the School of the Americas. When an FBI antiterrorist team attempts to shut Kerney out of the investigation, he smells a rat and follows the trail to a ruthless cell of intelligence agents turned assassins.The motives eventually coalesce around hush-hush software that would allow our government to snoop on South American governments and the outrageous premise that our military will brutally and enthusiastically kill its own citizens to keep the secret. The computer details were sketchy and confused; I never could pin down exactly what this software did. Fans of the series have praise author McGarrity as the "new Hillerman," who sensitively and eloquently portrays the landscapes and clashing cultures of the Southwest. I saw none of that in this over-the-top conspiracy mish-mash.
Reviewed in October, 2001
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Fatal Practice,
by Marvin J. Wanner
Paperback, Bookmark Publishing, 2001, 466 pages, $7.99
Robert Isen leads a boring life as a dentist in Corpus Christi, filling cavities and shyly fantasizing about his beautiful Costa Rican assistant. He world collapses when his brother-in-law and nine-year-old niece are killed in a New York mob hit. In his pain and rage he links up with a group of cybervigilates who exchange revenge fantasies in Internet chat rooms. Although he soon comes to his senses, his identity lingers on the Internet and he is forced to flee to escape the wrath of the Mafia.
This first novel lacks polish but the characters is a believable and the plot compelling. It's a good read. A nasty rival for the beautiful Amanda's affections clones the dentist's laptop hard drive and keeps the vigilante identity alive long after the protagonist lost interest. An FBI agent feeds the chat room flames. A toe briefly dipped into the dark side of the Internet can turn into a life-threatening nightmare. You have been warned.
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Reviewed in November, 2001
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Don't Cry for Me, Hot Pastrami,
by Sharon Kahn
Hardcover, Scribner, 2001, $24.00, 298 pages
 Ruby gets snookered into going on a cut-rate cruise of the Jewish Caribbean with the gang from Temple Rita. It's a cruise to die for. Willie Bob Gonzales, guest lecturer and an expert on Converso, or forcibly converted, Jews, drops dead on the boarding plank. Kevin, the klutzy rabbi, is corralled into delivering the promised lectures and scoops up Willie Bob's laptop to crib from his notes. He enlists Ruby, the only computer consultant in Eternal, Texas before half of the Silicon Valley moved there to join Dell Computers, to help him read the files. With the assistance of a mysterious reporter from "the only daily paper in San Antonio," Ruby uses her computer skills to solve a nasty mystery.
A key plot device hinges on Ruby's digital camera. A mugger grabs her 64 MB compact flash card, not realizing that the incriminating photos are stored in the camera's internal 8MB memory. Ruby is smug about having one of the few cameras with both internal and flash memory and I couldn't sleep until I figured out what it was. It must have been the Kodak DX3500. I'll ask the author when she's at Remember the Alibi on November 11th for a book signing. Ruby gets to flex all of her high tech muscles, from covertly slipping Willie Bob's files onto her zip drive to cracking the password on a Palm. This is a funny, well-written book with an engaging local twist. Recommended.
Reviewed in November, 2001
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The Raptor Virus,
by Frank Simon
aperback, Broadman & Holman, 2001, $12.99, 344 pages
 The Chinese government is masterminding a cyber-terrorist attack on the U.S., embedding a rogue circuit on Pacific Rim-made circuit boards that will cripple the telecommunications infrastructure. Paul, a yacht broker and part-time CIA researcher, hears murmurs of the scheme and consults his friend Hanna. The Chinese, wary of Hanna because of her success in foiling a previous Chinese Y2K plot, first try to fob her off with a well-paying but time wasting programming job and, when that doesn't work, send a hit squad after her and her new husband and stepson. Paul, meanwhile, races to smuggle a defector out of Hong Kong so that the chips can be repaired before the U.S. economy is ruined.
The plot is excellent, with plenty of high-tech suspense. It made me wonder whether it is wise for us to rely so heavily on cheap computer components made in nations that are not sympathetic with U.S. interests. On the downside, the writing was dreadful, getting bogged down in irrelevant detail and in a style that would make your high school English teacher cringe. Although I didn't realize it when I bought it, the book is categorized as Christian fiction. I have nothing against that genre, but these protagonists come across as self-righteous prigs and those who do not embrace fundamental Christianity may be made uncomfortable by the smug preachiness of parts of this book. The author is a computer consultant in Dallas.
Reviewed in December, 2001
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Death's Domain,
by Alex Matthews
Hardcover, Intrigue Press, Sep. 2001, 370 p., $23.95
 In her sixth mystery, Cassidy McCabe is stunned to read her own obituary in the local weekly, an obituary with nasty allusions to a tragic incident from her youth that she had long buried. The obit is quickly followed by a series of subtly threatening e-mails. Cassidy, a social worker in private practice, realizes that her husband is in grave danger from a deeply disturbed enemy nursing an ancient grudge against her and hustles to unmask her persecutor before he takes his or her revenge.
Lax network security provided the entry for a determined hacker to insert Cassidy's obituary without the editor's knowledge; the elaborately animated threatening e-mails, sent through an anonymous remailer, suggest to Cassidy that her tormentor has advanced computer skills. Her husband hires a hacker to break into university records to identify an old friend's college boyfriend. Although there are numerous high-tech aspects to the plot, calling this book Death's Domain is a bit of a stretch. The book sometimes becomes a little too cute (Matthews won a medallion from the Cat Writer's Association, enough said) and the psychological self-analyzing, although totally in character given Cassidy's job, is a little too angst-ridden for me.
Reviewed in December, 2001
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Killing the Shadows
by Val McDermid
Hardcover, Minotaur Books, Oct. 2001, 422 p, $25.95
 A serial killer is murdering well-known crime writers by reenacting the most gruesome parts of their best-selling books. Psychological profiler Fiona Cameron, busy with a case in Spain, is drawn into the case because her lover, Kit, fits the victim profile to a T. When the killer kidnaps Kit, Fiona abandons her computer and hightails it to the Scottish Highlands to save him.
Fiona's ace in the hole is crime linkage and geographical profiling software that helps predict where a serial criminal lives or works by drawing sophisticated map overlays. Other high-tech touches are a heavy reliance on e-mail and the use of true crime Web sites to keep abreast of the rumors surrounding the mystery. McDermid is a gifted writer; A Place of Execution, published last year, was an Edgar award finalist. Recommended
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