Caught in the Shadows

Computer hacker Becky Belski inadvertently stumbles into a computer network that links her to her past, offering evidence that her mother was actually innocent of the murder she had been convicted of twenty years earlier. Reprint.

Computer sleuth Becky Belski, of the Chicago consulting/snooping firm Resources, is called in to dish the dirt on Daryl and Lionel Aberdeen, a pair of socialites whose marriage went sour when (or even before) Daryl shot Lionel. But Becky's job--to find enough secrets for Daryl's lawyer, Bellini Reese, to keep the divorce out of the courtroom altogether--is swiftly eclipsed when she realizes that William Townsend, father of Aberdeen intimates Alan and Bill II, was killed 25 years ago by his second wife, Becky's own mother, only a few years after Townsend's own first wife died in a suspicious accident. Using her Aberdeen contacts--especially her oblivious half-brother Bill, who becomes the unlikely rival to a klutzy Reese associate, Michael Rosen, for her affections--Becky finds herself digging deeper into her own family mystery. The tangled-yet-obvious Townsend case, whose connection with the Aberdeens is pretty slight, ends up running away with the book, but Haddad (The Academic Factor, 1980, etc.) has made Becky appealingly hardheaded. It's a shame she doesn't seem due for an encore. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.