The Ultimate Rush

Check out Chet Griffin! He's a tattooed, snake-owning, San Francisco-dwelling, way attitudinous dude! He works as a Rollerblade messenger by day and surfs the Internet as an outlaw computer hacker by night until his courier job--combined with his relentless pursuit of the ultimate adrenaline high--gets him mixed up in an illegal investment scheme. Soon the Chinese and Italian mafias, the police and the FCIC (Federal Computer Investigations Committee) are chasing him and his punk-rock girlfriend through the streets, the sewers and the public transportation system of his native city. Chet may be little more than an amalgam of Generation X stereotypes, and the contrived plot leans a little heavily on previous cyberthrillers like Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and extreme-sports action movies like Point Break, but Quirk knows how to keep an action plot twisting along, and his relentlessly bubbly, hip one-liners hit as often as they miss. Readers who don't mind MTV and ESPN2 cliches will enjoy the amusement park of a plot, a handful of engaging characters--particularly Chet's wheelchair-bound roommate--and some memorable wisecracks. Major ad/promo; author tour; audio rights to S&S. (Mar.)