Interception: An Internet Thriller

When a client disappears after leaving her husband and children for a man she met on the Internet, New York psychologist Andi Lawrence plunges into the digital world. Freighting his plot with a load of computer imagery (corridors, avatars, hub centers, teleporters, windows and chat rooms), Watkins (Virus) conjures up a nightmarish vision of technology run amok. Online, Andi ""meets"" Grant Kingsley, handsome widower and California horse trainer. Swapping e-mail (and quoting each other's lines at numbing length), they fall in love. (""You can't know what it means to see those words here on my screen."") When she flies to California to meet her lover, however, it is not Grant who turns up but handsome Colin, who, having intercepted Andi and Grant's letters, has substituted his own picture for Grant's. Colin is the mastermind and chief recruiter for a Singapore computer firm that turns young women into cyborg-like computer processors. Grant, helped by one of Colin's victims who has an unrequited crush on him, uncovers the evil scheme and sets out to free Andi from Colin's desert stronghold. Conveniently, Grant is an ex-Navy SEAL. After much violence, the good guys win. Watkins's novel is suitably suspenseful and spiked with some impressively horrid imagery. But the computer hell he envisions is too far-fetched to convince computerphiles and too bizarre to play effectively upon the fears of most computerphobes. (Apr.)