Crossed Wires

Finley, an electronic detective for the National Crime Information and Analysis Center, makes a few faceless friends through her modem, but as they suddenly begin to log off for good, Finley feels that her life is also threatened.

Finley, the appealing heroine of this offbeat first novel, inhabits the futuristic milieu of those PC buffs who use extensive computer networks to chat with close pals they've neither seen nor heard. Impaired hearing has limited her social life, but she has an absorbing job ferreting out facts and criminal patterns on her terminal at the National Crime Information and Analysis Center. This research hits home when Finley starts tracking a serial killer who is culling victims from her own electronic bulletin board system--and who targets her as the next corpse. Unfortunately, Simpson now requires Finley (thought smart by her co-workers) to perform such stupid, look-out-behind-you acts that the reader is way ahead of her in spotting the murderer. But the computer procedures are clearly explained and fascinating, and, in spite of patches of arty prose, the action scenes are winners--graphic, forceful and some of them quite funny.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

First-novelist Simpson's come up with a nifty premise for a detective story: A hearing-impaired government researcher known simply as Finley, who feels comfortable and secure only with the friends she talks to via her computer keyboard, investigates a series of throat- slashings by finding out which bulletin boards the victims had logged onto. But, unfortunately, the book doesn't live up to its conception: The characters--from the computer-fearing cop who works with Finley to the Pelagianist killer who believes (like Raskolnikov, but a lot less compellingly) in establishing his freedom by acting without motivation--are uniformly flat, and Finley, who never realizes that she's been chatting electronically with the murderer for months, and opens her door to a black-clad stranger after she's been warned that her life's at stake, is one of the densest detectives around. Routine stuff, then, with perhaps some appeal for modem mavens. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.