Fire Cracker
Shirley Kennett. Kensington Publishing Corporation, $21.95 (312pp) ISBN 978-1-57566-181-0
Will ""Cracker"" Carpenter is a veteran highway robber on the information highway, earning money by compiling confidential profiles. In Kennett's (Gray Matter) second novel, however, Cracker turns his skills in a deadly direction. He hacks into a hospital's computerized operating system and murders wealthy Rowena Clark by changing the computer records of her medical status and treatment protocols. But Clark is not his real target--Cracker's planning an elaborate trap for his stepmother, Mom Elly, who, he believes, killed his father. A tough homicide cop, Leo Schultz, suspects Dr. Graham, Clark's physician, a woman who appears to be hiding something. His partner (and boss), PJ Gray, isn't so sure. PJ directs the Computerized Homicide Investigation Project, a small, under-funded unit of four in the St. Louis Police Department. She's 40, a single mother with a 12-year-old boy, and she's an expert in using virtual reality as a crime-solving tool. Leo is boorish but real, a good counterpoint to PJ's first-class cyber-brain. Another patient's medical orders are altered by computer, and the patient dies of insulin overdose. Cracker stays one step ahead of PJ, seemingly all-powerful in his ability to cause death with a keystroke. The pace crackles when PJ enters the virtual hospital-room crime scene she's developed, first as ""killer"" and then as ""victim."" Kennett capably works the hig-tech angle, but the bang in Fire Cracker fizzles because we learn so much about Cracker's past that his next moves, and ultimately the outcome, fail to surprise us. (July)
Details
Reviewed on: 06/30/1997
Genre: Fiction
MP3 CD - 978-1-5318-0758-0
Mass Market Paperbound - 352 pages - 978-0-7860-0525-3