A Woman's Place: A Crime Novel with Catherine Sayler

Expertly accelerated tension holds the reader's attention as San Francisco PI Catherine Sayler confronts sexism--in the extreme--in the '90s workplace. Allen Leggett, CEO of Systech, a software development firm with sexual harassment problems, hires Catherine and Jesse, her (male) business partner, to find ``one guy--and it has to be a salesman, not a programmer'' to make an example of. Both enter the workplace as new employees. Jesse checks out the obscene e-mail messages on the computer system as Catherine searches for the harasser(s) among an assortment of gleefully sexist computer cowboys. She begins to suspect that more than crude jokes may be going on when Systech manager Sheila Wainwright hints that she is out for ``bigger game'' than a prankster and when Leggett stands by a smarmy v-p who dismisses photos of women being tortured as ``boys-will-be-boys stuff''--right up to the sadistic murder of a female employee. By escalating from the everyday to the barely imaginable, Grant ( Love nor Money ) makes the most of her material, registering her points on issues while keeping entertainment the focus of her story. (May)