Vampire Bytes

Role-playing games (RPGs)--virtual and actual--take center stage in this perceptive sixth entry in Grant's series starring San Francisco Bay Area's technologically savvy PI Catherine Sayler (Lethal Genes, etc.). Catherine hires on with a computer gaming company to find its lead programmer, Matt Demming, who has fled and taken with him a new vampire game's source code. Before she gets very deeply into the case, the young man's body is found, drained of blood with two puncture wounds in his neck. Because Matt also played the role of a vampire in a live-action RPG taking place on the streets, the police are divided as to whether the killing is related to business (his computer and the code are still missing) or a cult. While the cops hash out their theories, egged on by a minister who has sworn to demolish all cults, Catherine agrees to help search for Chloe Dorn, the missing friend of her teenage niece. Chloe, Catherine learns, had been with Matt the evening he disappeared. E-mail, computer games and the Internet figure prominently as Grant expertly juggles the emotional and technological elements of the game players' fanciful, often terrifying world, where the lines separating fantasy and reality blur. (Apr.)